Page 26 of All That Has Flown Beyond
He let the tide take him where it may.
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Therapy started with lists.Coping mechanisms, Claudia called them. Things Kaiyo could do or think to ‘prevent the escalation of an emotion’. Not to eradicate it completely. Just to stop or slow its tracks.
Then, there were charts of goals. First, to practice the coping mechanisms. Then, to not be a useless piece of shit. A goal to make his bed, another to brush his teeth, another to watch a movie he’d been meaning to see.
“Yeah, but I didn’t finish,” Kaiyo groused about redoing his bed with fresh sheets. He’d been sleeping under a bare duvet ever since.
“The truth is, Kaiyo, that the real goal isn’t to achieve these things. It’s to try.”
The more he used it, the easier it was to turn the wheel and axle of his body. There were moments when he thought,Maybe.
There were others when he thought,Stop.
On Wednesday, Kaiyo made the mistake of looking out the window. He shifted the blackout blinds, and light seared his vision. For a moment he was blinded. Then, from the disorienting whitewash grew the city.
The marching of buildings, strictly divided by roads. He couldn’t see it, but he knew the back of this lumbering creature was crawling with people. His heart started to race, bile rising in his throat at the thought of the endless demands, brick upon brick upon brick of them, of all the things he had to do, all the things he should have been doing.
He stumbled away then forwards, scraping the curtain shut with such desperate force he almost ripped the tension rod out of the window. His breath was rasping out of him. He crawled onto his bed, under the covers, until it was dark and suffocating, filled with nothing but his warm, carbonized breath. He put his hand over his heart where it was racing. He put his hand on his stomach, tight and sick.
He was pathetic.Pathetic. The world was out there, functioning, continuing without him, while he counted brushing his fucking teeth as a victory.
He wrapped his arms around himself as he started disintegrating. He was nothing. He was just a liquid: red-brown, putrid, rank, seeping through his bedding, through the floorboards. He was a stain on his neighbour’s ceiling.
He was nothing.
He was nothing.
**********
“I don’t…I just, nothing’s changed. I just don’t feel better.”
“What would feeling better look like?” Claudia asked. Her round face was attentive as she looked at Kaiyo. He shrugged, looking back at her eyes, two green almonds that hadn’t yet fallen from the tree. Her skin was smooth, coloured like the earth in summer, brightened by the rays of the sun. There was a small Rorschach of a birthmark by her right ear that looked vaguely like a swimming selkie to Kaiyo.
“I don’t know. Not like this.”
“What is ‘this’?”
“This…nothingness.” Hopelessness.
“Okay. We’ve learnt a lot about understandable but inaccurate perspectives since we started therapy…four months ago now, isn’t it? Let’s just try to step away from whether it feels like something has changed and look at things more factually. Tell me one thing that has changed in the last four months.”
Kaiyo thought about the wheel and axle of his body. How there were days it was quiet in its protest. “I don’t know. I’m taking a shower most days, I guess.”
“Okay. What else?”
“I’m just…I don’t know. Doing things.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Kaiyo said, blowing out a frustrated breath. “Does it matter? I stillfeellike shit.”
“On your one-to-ten scale, do you still feel at a zero?”
“Yes.”
“As often?”
