31-32 Years Old

Once, long ago, I wrote a note to myself:

“If it goes badly, go and see the doctor.”

This entire year was spent at the doctor’s. Sitting in a huge chair I told him I had invented a family, I had invented a daughter and a grandchild and I told him that my house is demolished now because I have been trying to get rid of a shadow.

The doctor’s surgery is made of oblongs of maple and other expensive wood. It has no scent, but the doctor smells of an aftershave designed to make me feel as though we are in different universes, like I might as well be confessing to the stars.

I describe in detail the ruins of this failed dream, show him the evidence of my conceit: Lists written in gibberish, a couple of child’s paintings, I talk about how I spent weeks living in a hutch. How there are secrets about my daughter that I can never reach and which devour me.

I have imagined a family for some reason and now they are eating me alive, please help me! I beg the smell of the universe to help me.

He listens for hours to me crying, shouting, snoozing in his aftershave. I feel myself shrinking when he looks at me finally.

“Why do you say your family is imaginary?”

I am shrinking

“Does it make you feel safer to think of them not as real people?”

I am naked

“Have you tried talking to your wife about how you feel?”

It rains through the open window. I whisper:

“I’m not married. I have no children.”

He’s unfolding the list I wrote when May was born. At the top it once said No Matter What. It’s not writing now, just lines that mean nothing.

“No Matter What, I will always look after your fontanel”

I’m a speck of ash floating in the rain water.

“I am recommending a course of supervised recuperation in hospital. In the mean time, there’s someone here to see you”

He opens a door in the wall, and in they come, all of them, the faceless light-bulbs who I love. From whom there is no escape.