Page 10 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

Catherine had looked a little irritated about how I was interrupting her, but once she understood, her demeanor changed. “Oh. No, I don’t think…”

“If my rogue temporal lobe makes it happen,” I said, borrowing her term even though I didn’t much care for it, “and this works on the problems with my temporal lobe, wouldn’t it conveniently fix the whole fucking…Epileptic…Package? I mean, can a pill really pick and choose?”

Catherine looked completely confounded. “You can write on them. You can do it. This will go away, and if it doesn’t, just remember that you wrote before your accident.”

My accident. Could she please stop calling it that, like I’d been in a fender bender or fallen off a slide? I did throw the pillow that time, although at the floor instead of the window. She didn’t understand how hard the past few weeks had been. Nobody could understand what it felt like when the flow of creativity that came so fucking easily to me dried up like a parched, cracked riverbed.

“We can try a different mood stabilizer, but you do need one that doubles as an anticonvulsant. I mean, you can go back to the neurologist.”

“I don’t want to go back to the neurologist.” My words sounded like those of a petulant toddler, but I meant them. I didn’t want to go back to the neurologist, ever. I didn’t want any reason to. I’d never cried in a therapy session, and I was damn close, but I wasn’t about to start now.

“I’m sorry, Sam. I know this is hard on you.”

I’d never thought of my compulsive writing as a curse, but rather something that made me special. I supposed that sometimes it got in the way of sleep, food, my relationships, even sometimes my teaching when my mind wandered, but I’d never missed a class. I sort of hoped that if it really did turn off my writing, this cocktail wouldn’t work, but frankly, over the next few months, I felt better than I ever had in my life. It was indeed the elusive even keel, and I could do things like getting through difficult moments without crying or yelling, and even date without being a nuisance. I had a new girlfriend, and things were great. The only thing that wasn’t great was that the writing that had gushed out of me so easily continued to be little more than a trickle.

I learned to work with it and managed to squeeze out a couple of books over the next few years, but sometimes I got frustrated enough to go off my meds and enjoy a week or so of unbridled writing. Catherine got mad at me every time, but she was patient, and we continued to work through the other things we’d been discussing before that particular crisis happened.

A week after the incident at Kroger, I sat in the lobby at Catherine’s practice, lips tight. I’d almost cancelled my biweekly appointment because I really didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t like looking stupid, and I really didn’t like talking about how I didn’t like looking stupid.

After an exhausted-looking young woman left, I counted the ten minutes until Catherine appeared in the doorway and ushered me into her office.

In complete silence, I took my spot on the right side of the sofa, grabbed the throw pillow, tucked it where it belonged beside me. I was like clockwork, and I could feel myself ticking.

Catherine closed the door and sat gingerly in her chair, watching me the whole time. She fingered my chart lazily, crossed her legs at the knee, took a sip of coffee. “How have you been?”

I stared out the window at the air conditioner unit. “Fine.”

“Really.”

“Uh-huh.”

Silence. Catherine sighed. “You’re paying for this.”

“Veronica is still in town.”

“Pardon?”

“My ex pretended to move out of town in order to get rid of me.”

She blinked. “Are you sure she actually—”

“The woman packed everything she owned into boxes. The last night I saw her, we were sitting on the floor in her apartment completely surrounded with boxes. I spent days helping her put everything into boxes.”

“Remind me where she was moving?”

“St. Louis. She spent weeks in St. Louis, allegedly interviewing for a job and finding an apartment. She quit her job here. She quit her job.”

“And you’re certain that she’s still in town?”

I raised my eyebrows at the window. “I ran into her at Kroger.”

“And she told you she was still in town?”

“I didn’t actually talk to her.”

“Then how do you know she wasn’t just visiting?”

I didn’t bother to think about how I would feel if she was actually visiting and hadn’t told me. “She was cuddling up to one of our mutual friends.”