Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,17
Briefcases. Windsor knots.
• • •
There’s nobody who thinks like us—Her and me—anymore. And it’s probably for a good reason. We are dreamers. We worship love, we hope against hope and toss practicality out the window. We believe in magic and ghosts and lies. We wear each other’s clothes. We huddle for warmth. We were made for fashion, not function. We have a lot of growing up to do.
And suddenly, I realize that I’m sweating. Or maybe crying. Or both. I haven’t felt this way in years. I’m standing there shaking when I decide it’s time to call my parents and tell them I’m back in town for the weekend. It’s time to tell them that I’m crashing, and I need help. Call the doctors. Bring on the meds. If I’m going to limp through life, I might as well use a chemical crutch. Like I said, times are tough for dreamers.
9
The meds take two weeks to saturate my system. Even the US Postal Service works faster than that. In the meantime, I spend my days in the waiting room of my old psychiatrist, leafing through the same magazines, staring at the same framed print (a reproduction of Seurat’s painting—the one from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—touting the 1984 Chicago Art Expo) on the wall. The waiting rooms of psychiatrists are the most depressing places on earth, and they’re always identical, no matter where you go. Old magazines, leather couches, muted color schemes. Coatrack. Potted plant. Vaguely tribal sculpture/Persian area rug. Occasionally there is also one of those machines that replicates the sound of waves crashing or fills the room with the hushed fizz of white noise. The only thing that changes is the name of the city where the art expo has been held, but even then, the image behind the glass is always the same . . . Monet’s Water Lilies or a Cézanne still life or van Gogh’s Starry Night (because, hey, he was crazy too!), something swirly and soothing, meant to put the patients at ease, but instead just makes them want to rip the thing off the wall and smash it and slice their wrists open with the shards and get blood all over the sofa set. It’s amazing to me that psychiatrists the world over haven’t realized this yet.
At the far end of the waiting room is the door to the psychiatrist’s inner sanctum, and behind it, someone is currently spilling his or her guts. As my session gets closer, there’s a rush of anticipation, because I can’t wait to see who will emerge from the room. It’s usually a kid my age, and he never makes eye contact with me, just keeps his head down and beats a path to the exit. He’s like one of those criminals you see on the news, trying to cover his face with his hands as he’s being led away by the cops. I like to imagine what he’s been talking about in there, what sins he’s hiding, what’s devouring him from the inside. I pretend that maybe he’s more screwed up than me, and that, when I go into the room, the psychiatrist will look at me and crack a joke, something like “Boy, you think you’ve got problems,” and we’d both laugh.
Today, though, it’s a girl who comes out of the room, maybe a few years younger than me. She’s got red hair pulled back tight on her head, and she’s wearing a pink sweater. You can tell she’s been crying. I turn my gaze to the Persian rug beneath my feet, pretend to be incredibly interested in the patterns of the thing, as she fumbles for her coat. I don’t want to look up and see her face. I don’t want to know what’s devouring her insides. So I hold my breath and keep my head down until I hear her leave the office. There’s a brief silence, some rustling of papers on the other side of the door, and then the psychiatrist emerges and asks if I’m ready. He doesn’t skip a beat, doesn’t even take a moment to compose himself. On to the next tragedy.
The psychiatrist is wearing khakis and a wool sweater. It looks itchy as hell. His neck gathers at the top of it, folds of pink flesh with a gigantic head perched on top. It makes him look like a snapping turtle. He sits back in his chair, crosses his left leg over his right, and asks me how I’m feeling.