Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos

Author:Evan Roskos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26.

THAT NIGHT I START AN E-MAIL to Jorie to tell her about therapy. Then I scrap the e-mail completely, realizing I’m more likely to see my sister in person than she is likely to get to a library to check her e-mail. How did people stay in touch before the Internet?

Dr. Bird says, “Messenger pigeons are efficient and whimsical.” I think she’s joking.

I stare up at my tree collage in low lamplight. I should be doing homework. I have two papers to write and a book to read and chapter questions to answer. I’m not sure what subjects go with what assignments, but I’m not convinced it matters. I’ll talk my way into an extension for everything that’s important and I’ll take the zeros for homework. It’s easier that way. Or maybe I just won’t hand anything in.

I shut my eyes. Dr. Bird says she knows about my real therapist. Of course she knows. She knows everything.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Bird. I need someone who can think outside of me.”

Dr. Bird asks what I think about medicating my anxieties away.

I stare at her round, black eye. I notice the shimmer to her feather color that looks like the gasoline rainbow in parking lot puddles.

I tell her I’m afraid that I’ll become a muted person. Different. Dull. Like I’ll be in limbo, constantly. I say I’m not sure if being numb is any different than what I feel now.

She asks me if I do feel numb. If numbness really captures what I feel when I’m anxious or sad.

“I can’t tell right now because I don’t feel like I’m anxious or sad.”

She asks if I’m happy or calm.

“I feel like this is the kind of calm I can achieve.”

I think about taking medication and then go online to read about the effects. Dr. Dora didn’t name any medicines I should take, so I look up info about anxiety and depression pills. All the top Google hits are stories about kids who take antidepressants and end up more depressed and kill themselves. The medicine made him do it. That’s the title to an article I don’t want to read. Maybe it’s just isolated cases that people are freaking out about.

Maybe the medicine doesn’t make these kids more depressed, maybe it just didn’t make them feel better and they gave up. Medicine failure, broken promise, last shred of hope. Goodbye.

I call Jorie’s cell number just in case she got it working again. It rings and rings, so I listen to the rings for a while.

She is so much more damaged than I ever thought. Am I that damaged? I don’t have a box of pain. I have a tree on my ceiling, though. I don’t cut myself, but I hug trees. I spend more than a few nanoseconds a day wondering what it would be like to kill myself. Is this all the same thing but different?

I pull up Beth’s contact information on my phone. I haven’t called her before. Ever. But she gave me her number so we could text.

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