Rufino+has+a+memoir

__Time is Running Out__ By Khera Rufino

My foot’s tapping is entirely in tune with the clock’s ticking. The other woman in the waiting room is scratching her hosed leg in time with both my foot and the clock, and the radio is clicking with the sounds of some odd song of the same tempo. I’ve planned it to be this way. I turn on my CD player and I raise the volume to six with two extra bars; one digit all together, divisible by two. My mother pokes my knee, everything’s ruined, and now I won’t be able to stop biting my nails or yanking my hair out; maybe both. Ellen opens the door and very pleasantly kicks some lady out of her office. Ellen’s perfectly nice, just utterly useless to me. If anything, my mentality is unhealthier as a result of her counting disorders off on her hands and telling me I have them. My interest in therapy has waned significantly since beginning it almost two years ago. In fact, I think I was a lot less anxious when I was blissfully unaware. Ellen sits in her chair and lectures me on my life while occasionally asking for my input. “Khera, how have you been sleeping lately?” //She’s wearing three bracelets on the left. The clock goes, ‘tick’ on the second beat.// “Not so well.” //Tick. Beat.// “So, you haven’t slept for about two weeks, how is this affecting you?” //I never gave her a timeframe… Fuck, she’s messed up the ticking. Tick. Beat. Tick. Fuck it.// “Well, actually I have slept, I just haven’t-” She cuts me off. “This is unhealthy! That’s probably why you’re sick so often!” At this point, I’ve gotten so anxious about the ticking, my health and her enormous blue eyes that I can barely breathe. Anxiety, if you’re curious, isn’t a fun ride to be on. Imagine an unsafe wooden roller coaster that starts out slow, and as you go up and up, and up, you get more and more excited about the drop that’s about to come. You go up until the clouds engulf you and the air thins. As the pace quickens, your excitement goes from enjoyment to terror in nothing flat, the most upsetting panic fathomable eating away at your sanity. Your breath starts escaping you in little gasps; you start regretting how mean you were to that greasy kid in second grade. You drop. It’s not exhilarating or relieving. It’s the epitome of horror, as if a giant has taken your car in its mammoth hands and hurled you toward the Earth in a fit of displeasure. You don’t hit the bottom completely. Like an unspoken “//wingardium leviosa”// is cast upon you, you’re levitating, unable to touch the ground again, because it is blatantly clear that you, against your better judgment, will be on that ride again. Every goddamn day of my life. Ellen doesn’t listen. She writes a lot, and she talks a lot, but every word I say is inconsequential. I can't even get someone who's paid to listen to me to let me talk. She diagnoses me without letting me get a word in. Khera’s depressed. Khera’s anxious. Khera’s obsessive. Khera’s antisocial. Khera’s paranoid. Khera’s defensive. Khera’s fully aware. Can Khera go home, now? No.

I spend forty-five minutes every Thursday with Ellen, though it feels like forty-five years. Years of monotony and silence, lecture and criticism, I have other things to worry about without her. I somehow make time to worry about all of it. The drive home is euphoria and bottomless agony all at once. On one hand, I’ve escaped Ellen without flinging myself from the building for another week. On the other, my mother wants to talk about it. There’s no denying that the woman cares about me, it’s just miraculously hard to believe it most of the time. “So, what do you think of what Ellen said?” What //do// I think of what Ellen said? I think she’s right about whatever insanities I may possess, but she’s not helpful. I think she’d be a wonderful advice-giver if she would listen to the occurrences that warrant her advice, and I have no interest in seeing her anymore. I don’t say this. It wouldn’t help. “I don’t know.” I never actually say what I’m thinking, even if it’s an entirely valid thought. I’m meant to be the comic relief; the friend that listens, agrees and hugs, then offers a too-soon joke that still manages to take the edge off of the situation. That’s what I’m there for. If I talk about my problems, I get the, “you’re such a downer” speech. Every time I get that speech, I feel as if the bastard giving it has taken what little progress I may have made and attacked it with a machete, leaving it dead and bloody in the gutter. Call it dramatic, I call it another panic attack. No one is ever comfortable with hearing about the novelty’s feelings. So, nobody does. I allow my conversation with my mother to die out and listen to the adorable tones of the ukulele, allowing it to lull me into a false sense of security while I think. Being trapped in my own head is considerably better than being exposed to the outside world, demanding my censored thoughts and forced humor. I may be a neurotic twit in my head, but at least I’m not lying to anyone in there. I get home and sit down at the computer and turn on some music, opening Microsoft Word to write my memoir. My first attempt is a strange jumbled mess of funny stories from my childhood. The next is a heartbreaking paragraph on my sister. I’ve scrapped the sister idea, and I’m working on my next short story, deciding to work on my memoir tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. Getting home from therapy one day, I sit down to write again, realizing that I have a world of material, just no guts to share it. I pick up my journal and start scribbling. //I’m irate.// //I just got back from damn Ellen. I’m really glad I decided against getting into the psychoanalyst biz. If I ever gave advice the way Ellen does and made my patients dread going to me and manage to be COMEPLETELY FUCKING OBLIVIOUS, I wouldn’t be able to handle myself. She makes getting over all the shit she says I have wrong with me entirely impossible. The more she brings it up, the harder it is to get over. It’s like every time she tells me how depressed I am, she’s adding another foot to the gymnastics horse of problems I have to hop over.// //I wonder if any of her patients have ever committed suicide. I could never, but if I was her, I totally would if that happened; are you kidding me? To be so bad at your job that someone actually takes their own life? I suppose they teach you to deal with this kind of crap while you’re getting your degrees, but still, I couldn’t do it. That fear would always be in the back of my mind.// //I guess that’s why some people are doing the helping, and other people are being helped.// *** I get up from the chair in the suffocating, windowless waiting room as Ellen beckons me inside. I take my post on the pleather couch, facing her as her buggy eyes and white hair seem to buzz with their prominence. I sit neatly and simply, lacing my hands and crossing my legs. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you, Khera.” “Um, okay.” //This should be good.// “I’ve been wondering, how do you feel when you have your panic attacks?” //Finally, a question that might get me to a coping mechanism, or a drug, or something.// “I normally feel really tight in my body, like something’s trying to get out,” I falter, “that thing’s trying to get out, and I want it out, but I can’t do anything, something’s pressing down on me. It’s like I’m being… restricted. Bound and restricted.” I’m proud of my answer. It’s honest and lengthy, and incorporates a lyric from a good song. I wait for her response, hoping it might ease some of the knots in my body, but I’m also terrified. I look at my fingers and count my knuckles silently before looking up, her silence worrying me. She looks up from her phone, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening, my friend just sent me this adorable picture of a monkey that she saw at the zoo today with her daughter,” she shows it to me, I let out a half-hearted coo to move things along, “now, what did you say?” “Nothing. I don’t know how I feel.” //Tick. Beat. Tick. Beat. Beat. Tock.// //Dammit.//