Credit

Sitting on the exam table the thin paper crinkles with the slightest movement.

Do you think of self-harm?
No.
(Are you asking if I want to live?)

No plans to kill yourself?
No.
(Do you care that I don’t want to live?)

You need to take these the same time every day, can you do that?
Yes.
(This isn’t really to help me but make it easier for others to pretend everything is just peachy, isn’t it?)

See the receptionist on your way out to set a follow-up in one month.
Thank you.
(But will it fix me?)

Lying on the kitchen floor in a fetal position she prays to a god she doesn’t believe in between heaving sobs and jagged breaths.

Please let me die. Why does this torture never end? Please, make it stop.
Do you think of self-harm?

Will this finally end when I die? I just want this to end and I don’t know how to make it go away.
No plans to kill yourself?

I take the pills every day but I still feel the same. I just want someone to lie and tell me this will end.
Don’t cry in public, or at work, or around others. It makes them uncomfortable.

Please, god, kill me already, I will see the receptionist on the way down, just kill me.
That will be a twenty-dollar co-pay. Thank you.

Thanatos leans against the kitchen counter holding a glass of bourbon.

Please, god, how much longer will you torture me?
I am not god.

Thanatos, let me die, please, I can’t endure anymore.
Oh, my love, my love, I need you.

I hate you.
I love you.

Thanatos holds out the bourbon. She swallows the deep amber liquid feeling the heat sear her esophagus and her vision blurs attempting to focus on the label, Woodford Reserve. Her mind holds on to the thread of words, the white font on clear bottle, feeling the pressure of tiles against her knees. She feels his hands on her shoulders, lifting her from her knees, despite her inward protestations. She wants to stay fetal, prone, begging for release, weeping with incomprehensible sadness but his loving hands lift her up and pulls her to his chest. She feels his heartbeat like an ache. A thrum vibrating as his desire rises. She falls into that vibration, that dark love, that void of emptiness taking solace that her pain releases him briefly from an unending existence of mundanity.

And in that embrace, feeling his vibration, she breaks apart. However briefly, he releases her from the pain, the darkness, the sadness that shatters her tentative grasp on a depressing reality and lets her dance along a fantasy of love and light. He takes her out to the universe, dancing along the inhuman pulses of supernovas and shows her what she knows; being free and wild beyond her skin that begs from a god she doesn’t believe. Lifting her up beyond her despair feeds his own implosion. He wishes he could make her understand that he can not touch those stars, dance along the comet’s tail, drink the supernova without her. Without her he is a husk broken and fetal. If he granted the release she begs for he’d be left alone to walk eternity never tasting the aether. With her he weaved a tapestry of dark matter expanding and exploding the universe.

Sitting on the exam table the thin paper crinkles with the slightest movement.

Do you think of self-harm?
No.
(I have not seen Thanatos for weeks.)

No plans to kill yourself?
No.
(I am out of Woodford Reserve.)

So you’re feeling better?
Yes.
(I have a larger gray cubicle at work since I stopped crying all the time.)

See the receptionist on your way out to set a follow-up in one month.
Thank you.
(I guess I’m fixed?)