Eyebrow

I’m trying to figure out if my therapist is raising an eyebrow or if his face is just angled that way. His right one has been at least one and a half centimetres higher than his left for the last 20 minutes, causing the wrinkles on his forehead to curl like a very hungry caterpillar.

We’re sitting in the kiddy room, which explains the tiny chairs stacked up in the corner. Occasionally an anxious parent pops their head in without knocking, presumably searching for a long lost piece of offspring. This becomes our way of measuring time.

I haven’t given him much to frown about today. In fact, he’s pretty much deemed me sane. I tell him I’ve been self-therapising. The waiting list for this shit is, after all, longer than most psychotic episodes. We look at a flow chart and try to decide where I fit in. Since I’m not allowed to be one of the arrows, we have to pick one of the boxes. I don’t much care for the boxes, but say nothing because negative comments prompt him to make notes, which I think spoils the mystery.

My therapist is nervous. I make him feel uneasy because I’m not insane or diagnosable and because he is not so secretly in love with me. This makes him look at the floor with more frequency and concentration than he might do otherwise. He often wears a shirt with very striking buttons. They feature large Xs and are quite mesmerising. When I’m not looking at his eyebrows I am often caught in the gaze in one of these buttons. Although they don’t smile I can tell they’re a friendly bunch.

He confides that he is scared of dying alone – or, rather, living alone – in the same way that I am, or that everyone is. We both fall into the group of people for whom this concern looms with a somewhat larger shadow. We decide that nothing can be done and work on what he calls ‘acceptance’. The word grates against the backs of my eyes whilst he tries to outline how this might be achieved. I make him promise not to use any more flow charts. Somewhat reluctantly, he agrees.

When I’m not looking at his eyebrow, or his buttons, or the ring that’s not on his right hand, I stare at the torn curtain behind him. A small army of milkmaids pour bottomless pails of milk onto (or into) a blue abyss. I’m not quite sure what it’s meant to mean, but instead of asking my therapist I tell him a story about something that happened in the past week, but halfway through I get bored of my own voice and so ask him a question. This catches him off guard so he starts to answer, and I take this break in routine to look at his eyes and figure out what colour they are. Before, I would have guessed they were hazel or brown, but no, they are blue, just like the void.

We keep talking, and at some point it stops being therapy and starts being conversation. It’s our last session; I ask him how much skin I need to slice to be deemed worthy of a fresh batch, but this prompts the caterpillars on his forehead to form shapes I’ve never seen before. He says they’d probably assign me to someone else and so I decide not to bother. Nevertheless, I want him to come back the week after next, realise I’m gone forever, hold his head in his hands, and weep.

When I leave, I tie a blue ribbon to the right handle bar of his bike, by way of saying so long, or thanks, or I’ll miss you, or whatever sentiment comes to his mind as he pulls the end of the ribbon and folds it neatly into his left pocket.