Free Repeat After Me by Rachel Dewoskin

discussing the ways they feel about me or our sessions.” He paused. “Why are you here?” he asked gently.
    I looked around the office, noticing it for the first time. A photograph hid the spines of five books, probably self-help, on the shelf. In the picture, his wife had a sporty body and sailboating ponytail. Her smile was sly and squinty in the sun; tan kids grinned from under her rippling arms. Iimagined objects not pictured: play equipment in the backyard, the plaid or paisley beds they maybe slept in, shafts of light on plush rugs, lotion, likely Clinique, on her bathroom counter. Somewhere a yacht bobbed, waiting for weekends when he, finally away from the despair of others, was allowed to be happy with his family. I felt a jolt of resentment, as if injected into my arm.
    “My bossy boyfriend thought I needed therapy,” I said.
    Dr. Holderstein nodded. “Did you think so, too?”
    “I don’t know. Relative to what?”
    “Why did you agree to come and see me?”
    “Mainly to get Adam off my back, but I also thought it might be interesting.”
    “I hope it will be. Do you want to tell me about what’s going on in your life?”
    Pouring out your dark secrets to a professional has some of the same allure as having an emotional or online affair. The space between you and the doctor fills with information, and in the flash of your first confession (if it’s true), you’re cheating on the people you’re talking about, back -spacing your lovers into ghosts as soon as your bond with the shrink exceeds your intimacy with them. The doctor becomes your confidant and boyfriend, the new one with whom you analyze and thus disparage the old.
    Maybe that’s why I was so worried about what Dr. Holderstein thought of me. I was consumed by the possibility that he would find me pathetic. Or insane. Anxious to demonstrate a normalcy I couldn’t even have identified, let alone embodied, I talked about Columbia, my classes, Adam. I thought Dr. Holderstein would be dazzled by how normal and together and smart these anecdotes made me. But I chose the wrong details: the pigeon nesting behind the chalkboard instead of my coursework, the blinding white of certain Mondays, Adam’s candle-scented way ofspeaking. Dr. Holderstein told me he hoped I’d come weekly.
    And I did, for the first semester of my senior year. I enjoyed the habit of our meetings, even when I despised their content. I told him about my Eliot, Joyce, and Pound seminar, about the course called “Riot and Rebellion.” I described counting my letters, which Dr. Holderstein called obsessive-compulsive behavior, a term I liked. He said if it wasn’t getting in the way of my living a productive life, it wasn’t a problem.
    “It makes me feel happy,” I said. Even as I said it, I added “really,” so it would fit: i-t m-a-k-e-s m-e r-e-a-l-l-y h-a-p-p-y. Somewhere deep, a small alarm sounded, suggesting this was not true, even if it fit on twenty fingers.
    I told Dr. Holderstein that Mondays were white, Tuesdays were blue, Wednesdays were yellow, Thursdays brown, and Fridays red. He said people with colors for days have “synesthesia,” and I was less surprised to know he had a word for everything than I was to learn that not everyone had colors for the days. I could not imagine there were those who did have colors, but that theirs differed from mine. I longed to set the record straight.
    In fact, the life in my mind was itself increasingly colorful, cluttered, difficult. When I admitted that I had stopped sleeping, Dr. Holderstein was concerned. I said I didn’t need sleep, and for the first time, he objected forcefully. He threw the word “mania,” onto the desk between us, where it writhed and struggled for air. I said nothing, watched the blue, slippery word, hoped it would suffocate. He said there was the possibility, in someone who was “racing” the way I was, of an “episode.” I was unhappy when he suggested I take some lithium.
    “Why?”