Wish You Weren't Here

by Gracie Ruth Mitchell

“Have I gone crazy? You can tell me the truth. I can handle it.” I cannot handle it. It will go over very badly if I discover I’ve lost my mind. But I need to know.

He was a pretty good therapist, except that one time I went for a walk by the harbor and saw him and some of his friends LARPing on the docks. After that I had to bow out. I normally don’t care what you do on the weekends, but I kept imagining him with his fake elf ears while he was passing me the box of tissues and telling me about cognitive distortions.

I’m trying to take the high road, mostly because he lives in a teapot.

and my therapist said I was making real progress before I quit on account of the LARPing thing.

“Also, if I could just chime in with my opinion on something—you are almost offensively self-confident.”

So when I realize sometime after lunch that I’m on edge, I have to dig through several layers of deep denial to figure out why.