How I lost and Found My Mind: A short story, Part: 4

She wore a knit green sweater on this day. Fair-skin, thin-rimmed specs sitting low on the tip of a slender nose. Tiny diamond ear-rings –though ethereal luminescent grains of sand they were –straight, brown hair leveling off at the mahogany desk she sat behind. One of those hand-made beauties with intricate handy-work carved into the trim. The desk was new. That much I had known.

She was trying to ask me something but I was still having trouble hearing her over the ringing in my ears so…

I knew where I was though. It was a typical shrink’s office, clearly not the doctor’s old duplex in Pasadena; house-wife in one partition, shrink in the other.

The setup was similar; calming, creamy, off-white coat of paint on the walls, warm low-lit room, a flower pot on a shelf; with the first tendril of a Violet-to-be, a plush la-z-boy recliner in which my comfortable bum sat, and the sensation my brain was being incubated gently by the warmth of the room to more easily extract breakthroughs.

That’s what the doc gets paid for anyway:  Making the patient feel comfortable while they chip away at mankind bit by bit. Still something seemed off when I sat there. This new place was more… clinical.

Then reality hit me, I was in a Ward. Shadows laced the frosted glass door in a quick step as orderlies, patients and the illustrious masters of dysfunction, the doctors, waltzed by, going through their daily routine; saving minds one poor sack at a time. My thoughts went bonkers.

“God only knows what I’m in for. Electroshock therapy?  Behavioral conditioning? A lobotomy! Do they still do those?…”  on and on and on.

Irrational questions were flooding my mind. All my life I feared Psychiatric Wards; with their mental probing, sedation, trick questions and a questionable promise to uphold your deepest, darkest secrets as “Confidential” The latter part encompasses Shrink’s in general. My past time with Dr. Stuttgart had helped ease the fear a bit. But you pay them exorbitant amounts of money to feed you pills and talk about life. I could have done that in a back-alley of Compton. But she was nice; or knew how to act it very well.

“At least”

I tried to convince myself.

“There’s a familiar face in view.”

Right.