April 12 20XX

The door to the therapist's office was in front me as I sat there. She opens the door before I go in. The psych’s name is Morgan but her face and stature make her completely indescribable and plain, her name could have been Jane, Janine, Janice or Jericha and it would not have mattered. She’s been practicing for a while, A decade or two, half my life or maybe more? Unsure.

“What brings you in today Arthur?” she asked me. The couch is comfortable and the room is white and filled to the brim with books(mostly self help encyclopedias, stuff I’m not interested in). I don’t know what to say and most of the time my mind is blank when I’m asked these sorts of things, so answering these kinds of questions ends up being hard. I go with my gut.

“My dog died a week ago, but that was before I called. I guess- no, I want to get help with my problems.” my voice is craggy, I forgot to drink water before coming in. I don’t drink a lot of water to be honest. Not sure why I’m nervous, but the silence after I finish talking enhances the feeling. Morgan does not respond. Her hands move quickly on the pad in front of her and I can hear the scribbling down of notes but in the silence after she’s done I feel her blue eyes on me, not judging me, but simply on me...expectantly, it kind of turns me on. Older powerful women are hot! But you’re not supposed to want to fuck your therapist but maybe that’s something I should get help with. Day one problems. I take a deep breath before answering her stare. “I have a lot of stress from my school and family life. I had to recently move back here because the school work and stress of being at a university was too much, so I’m taking a break to get my head in order,” I stopped talking for a second. Before continuing “It was not required of me but I thought at least. I should at least get my shit in order. Where do I start?”

“Tell me about school, what was going on there?” Morgan finally speaks. Her voice is warm, like a sugary brown cup of coffee.

“I don’t know. The first semester there I could barely get out of bed. I hadn’t skipped classes ever when going to the community college here. I had handled 18 units of classes each semester, worked a job and did that just fine but moving down there….It seemed like the work was too much. Couldn’t bring myself to go out and explore the city for my classes. Stuff that I knew I could do, but couldn’t even force myself to. Ended up failing a bunch of classes and switched my major. By February I knew I couldn’t do it successfully and now I’m here. So I’m here.” She scribbles down more notes.

“It’s good that you could get yourself out of that situation. What do you think happened that first semester? Did you take a break between transferring?” she asks.

“Thanks. Uh, I really tried that first semester but I couldn’t lie to myself anymore about my chances of succeeding or of it getting better. You have got to know the upper limits to your shit man. And uh well I uh, I tried doing something else over the summer but that didn’t end up working out. That took basically the whole summer. It was really stressful so maybe it had some effect? I’m unsure-” I shift around nervously, not because I'm feeling judged, but more so cause I haven’t had someone to talk to about this type of thing in a while. “-Honestly it just felt like a lot of stuff that I ignored just caught up to me. Stuff from High School, from being a kid, from my family. Shit that I’ve been having to live with. But things have been better.” Her eyes move from me for the first time since stepping into the building and the noise of her jotting down notes consumes me.

“Tell me about your coping habits. Maybe a little about your family” Morgan says.

“Video games mostly, I worked out pretty hard my sophomore year and that was sorta helpful, but looking into a mirror and seeing your own better reflection can only so feel good so many times. Eventually you start hating the image that stares back.” It went on like that for an hour or so longer. It was a 5 p.m. appointment on a Wednesday. I leave feeling numb, not numb in a “I took some clonidine and I’m going to pass out for two hours feeling nothing”, but numb in that the quiet melancholy in my stomach goes away. I’m seeing Dr.Morgan again next week at the same time. The office she's in is in an okay part of town and the free therapy seems a bit out of place, but I appreciate it. There’s no new notifications on my phone, most people just leave me on read. The drive home I listen to Daft Punk. I’ve been listening to them ever since the end of freshman year of high school. I traded a loaf of french bread for a thumb drive with all of their albums, which was how I learned about moving albums and files onto your ipod, which opened me up to understanding computers. Recently I haven’t really listened to Daft Punk as much, I found synthwave a few years back and since then it just caught my ear like nothing else. Tonight is different. I feel more raw, and a bit more aware of myself;small senses of emotional clarity, plus it’s nice to listen to old music and reminisce about old memories. It’s good to after an hour of talking about bad ones.

I moved back into my old house a month ago. It’s on a cliff and has a lot of stuff I didn’t want to move to the college town, so every time I come home it feels like I’m a teenager again coming home from school. I keep it about the same as when I was that age anyways. My room is as messy as ever, the kitchen is spotless and every other part of the small house is generally clean. Sometimes when I want to get out of my room I go to the living room and hook up an old game console to play, otherwise I’m in my room playing video games or on my computer. Before it was mostly league of legends, more recently I’ve dipped my toe into playing games on my switch. I don’t go out as often as I did when I was younger but I still prefer having it in handheld mode since I’m a weirdo like that. Minecraft on the switch has been my poison as of late, despite owning it on PC and having full modding tools, there’s just something special about playing a whole entire world on a small little screen. I was not mincing my words with my therapist earlier telling her that video games were and pretty much are my only escape. I don’t smoke, drink or do any sort of drugs (except for clonidine).

I open the fridge. There’s a can of ginger ale, several ready to eat caesar salads, a carton of eggs and a sword. I grab the salad and soda ignoring the sword before closing the fridge. I carry all of it piled over each other to my room, ignoring the massive absence in the living room. I swallow the grief that I feel in that single instant as I open the door to my cave. I miss my dog.

My desk is not a mess, surprisingly. I do eat at it and it’s where I spend 90% of my time looking through the internet or playing video games on my computer. Currently a bodybuilding forum has my interest. It’s a bunch of roided out nerds that talk about their depression and body issues. It makes me feel slightly better about the weight I’ve gained in the last few months. It’s nice to read about how all of these effective Atlases are going through a similar struggle as mine. They’re nice enough as well, some of them told me a good way to start would be a quick little calisthenic workout; 50 squats. 25 sit ups. 15 push ups if I can manage. The strain is small but the feeling is big. I’ve been doing it for a few weeks and I can do 50 squats without a break and 35 sit ups if I’m not too winded. Pushups still are hard cause I’m a little overweight at 200ish pounds and 5’9. Most of my fat sits on my waist and belly. It’s been taking a toll on me mentally since I used to be skinny and lean and now I’m fat and gross. The workouts are helping so it hasn’t been as bad. More recently I’ve been going on walks since it’s starting to get warmer. I try to do an hour a day but today I was busy with work and therapy; I’m a school bus driver.

I rip open the plastic film that’s been keeping the salad fresh, crack open the ginger ale and log on to see the latest news on the board. BicepMxsterx69 says that his mom is trying to kick him out. Everyone else on the message board is saying it’s a good thing because he needs to get out of his parents place, supposedly he’s 35 and only has sick biceps and an insane physique to his name. I don’t say anything publicly on the board which is filled with extreme toxicity and hate towards him, but I feel bad since he’s a nice enough guy. I private message him telling him if he needs a place to stay for a while he can stay with me and I send him my address (it's a bad idea but I'm lonely what the heck). He doesn’t respond for the rest of the night. It makes me worried for him. Deeply worried. To get my mind off the possible loss of someone I sorta know, I check out this new show streaming on Netflix. A work friend told me it was super depressing. I forget the name of the show but it’s kinda neat? The main character sort of looks like me, just a bit older and gruffer. Maybe more handsome? I guess you can’t get a job in Hollywood unless you’re pretty or connected or both. I hope this Bicepmasterguy gets back to me. I’ve really been needing someone to help me get into shape, I have the looks and I guess I’m sort of connected (not that I want to be) so I just have to make sure I’m pretty enough for. For something I don’t know. Who wants to be a bus driver their whole life?

Anyways, It opens on the main guy, his name is actually Guy. I think the show is french? But the show is in english but it was made in France maybe? Anyways, he’s in his room laying in his bed in the dark staring a hole into the ceiling. Then there’s a sudden flash of a noose above him before it cuts away to him in the bathroom brushing his teeth. It’s the whole deal, spit and all. I know that cause in his spit there’s some red splotches, been there done that probably gonna do that soon honestly. He cleans up a bit but keeps this five o’clock shadow cause he looks good with it on, or he doesn’t have the will to shave it off. Guy leaves his shitty little apartment and starts this sad walk, the actor for Guy is acting his absolute heart out for this role. Each step after the last is sadder but he keeps going, while he walks the title crawl or credits or whatever begins and the title song is from a French musician I like called The Toxic Avenger, the song is called ЧЕРНОЕ ЛЕТО, I’ll look up what it means later. Anyways sunlight finally starts to break up the gray as he goes into this grossly white building.

It cuts to him at the counter preparing the small space he’s at before placing a stool to begin his long hard day at work. So he’s working at the gas station, but really he’s just lazing around waiting for customers to come in, get their shit and leave. Sometimes he’ll stop someone from robbing the store, other times he won’t. There’s like a small montage of it, it’s done really well and the song that plays is another Toxic Avenger song, Земной, again, gonna look it up. The montage ends with this shifty looking guy coming up to him, and asking him in french “Got the stuff?” I know this cause I can speak English and Spanish fluently and words will just kinda mix in and out in understanding, same with Italian, Portuguese and German for some reason. No luck with Russian or cyrilic languages though. The shifty guy asks his question and Guy with the same detached expression just nods and like any other interaction in the montage before, just does it, just hands what I now know as a drug addict something in a brown bag. Then another montage starts up of shiftier and shiftier looking people coming up and asking variations of what is essentially, “drugs?? Gimme drugs, I give you money so give me drugs”. At that point I’m too tired to keep watching the show, and decide it’s time for bed, but this show’s got my interest. Most definitely has my interest.

I’m laying in my bed when the sudden urge to message BicepMaster to let him know that if he needs someone to talk to, I’m there for him, even though he didn’t reply to my last message. As I’m laying down drifting away I ignore the dread that I feel realizing he didn’t get back to my first message. Also realizing how dumb it was to stay up til two a.m. when I gotta get up at five and have a full load from the get go. It’s not just getting kids to school, but also cause my teacher’s got something new to teach me. Then the computer beeps out a response. I don't know if it was in my head or if it happened. I hope it wasn’t.