(7) I am what I am

After the third nightmare Bonnie suggested I see a therapist friend of hers. “It can’t hurt,” she said when I protested, “and it might help.” She chuckled, reaching out to push my bangs back off my face to look at me. “Either you’re going emo on me or you need more sleep, your eyes have dark circles around them that match the ones I have today. So please, Blair, at least consider it.”

I was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good but she’d done a lot for me and I at least owed her the courtesy of taking her suggestion. So I made an appointment for the next day.

The therapist’s office was all dark wood and leather. The man was older and, frankly, just a bit creepy as far as I was concerned. Very fatherly in how he talked and acted but there was something in his eyes as he looked me over that made me wish I hadn’t come. However I had and I wasn’t going to walk out now. After all he was Bonnie’s friend.

That first time, while I lay on the proverbial psychiatrist’s couch and he sat in a chair just far enough behind me that I couldn’t see him, he asked me about the nightmares. I laid them out in great detail, each one different but with same recurring theme of being chased by some demented killer. I have a wicked imagination thanks to the horror films I’d seen. Apparently he wasn’t into that kind of movies because he never caught on, just lapped up what I was telling him as he tried to verbally analyze what they were about.

“I think you have a deep seated fear of loosing your virginity,” he said at one point, when I’d answered a question about how many men I’d ‘known’ sexually by telling him none. He believed that. I had to bite hard on my lip to keep from laughing out loud. Damn, I’m almost twenty-three. How many people get to be my age without having sex?

The session ended with him telling me I needed to make an appointment to see him again. I shrugged and agreed. Hell, it was a way to kill an hour and it was fun seeing how much crap I could feed him that he believed was the truth.