We’re at work in a hive of shrinks. We’re
gutting two bathrooms...
We’re at work in a hive of shrinks. We’re
gutting two bathrooms in a building which holds the offices of psychiatrists
and psychologists and social workers.
We move among the therapists and their flow of
patients who sit in halls waiting for their session on the couch. They look just the same as any smattering of humanity you might
encounter of a day. Some look so sad. Some look vacant and lost. Some are
chipper and smile wide or scroll on their phones as if waiting for the bus. It
has helped pass the time, imagining what brings these people in, what their
specific species of woe is. Time can be sensed by the doors opening and closing,
the hours of the day passed in fifty-minute intervals.
It’s happened before, when the metaphors come
too apt and too easy. But we have pulled back walls here and torn up floors and
we have put our faces into what’s below the surface. And I will tell you: it is
foul. It is no place you want to be. And behind the doors of these doctors, a
similar excavating is taking place, a peeling back, a peering in, a squinting
into the shadowy parts, to the dark corners we conceal so well with our own
walls. It takes so much time to dig in; it’s scary in there; it’s confusing
and gross. We found a bird’s nest in the joists between the floors. A bird’s
nest, and a dead bird. A sick and snarled tangle of feather, wing, straw,
filth. And behind those doors, on all the couches, in all of our minds, those same strange nests
exist in the shadows.
And I’d like to say: and with sweat and effort
and exhaustion, it can all be cleaned out, leveled, set right! And it can. But
also I am tired of looking behind the walls. And sick of finding what we find
there.
