STARTER FOR: @khalparekh
LOCATION: Center for Psychology.
SETTING: Afternoon.
Helping people is one of the only things keeping Oliver align these days. If you asked where the source of his impending doom was, he wouldn’t know how to answer, which frightens Oliver. You’d think that someone so in tune with human behavior would be able to decipher why he was feeling so scattered. But, no, here he was, clueless as ever.
Though, with an appointment on the horizon, he does what he can to ease into the day without any troubles. Once the time comes, he steps out of his office, smiling warmly over at Khalid, “Come on in, sorry for the wait,” Oliver says, nodding towards inside his office. He circles around his little desk, opening a drawer to retrieve his notepad and a pen. “So, how’re you feeling today?” He asks then, padding towards the armchair settled just across the couch Khalid usually sits on.
Khal imagines himself sitting the uncomfortable chair outside Dr. Stone’s office two weeks from now, two months from now, two years from now. He imagines the cushion taking the shape of his ass. He imagines himself--and Dr. Stone--going grey, sitting in his office one day while the therapist waits for his patient to open up and Khal on his deathbed refusing. His left leg hops up and down and his elbow digs into the armrest.
Khal runs his fingers back through his hair that he knows he needs to cut but he’d have to ask his mom for money because he is down to his last few hundred bucks in savings because he hasn’t had a job in over three months and it turns out moving across the country with what’s left of your shit after your girlfriend leaves you while you’re locked up in a psych ward isn’t cheap and even if he can bring himself to undergo the already incredibly embarrassing task of asking his mom for twenty bucks for a haircut it will come with impatient tisk of a woman who is ready for her thirty year old son to get his life together and maybe he never will so his life will be an endless cycle of asking his mom for twenty bucks for a hair cut and then waiting six months before dreading asking his mom for another twenty bucks for another hair cut and on and on and--
He barely registers Dr. Stone greeting him and ushering him into his office until he’s already following after him. Khal doesn’t sit. Instead he moves around the room like he’s inspecting it, in the way he’s seen people do in movies. He lingers.
“I’m fine,” he says, because telling his therapist that he just spent he doesn’t even know how long letting his thoughts spiral from a hair cut to living in his childhood bedroom in his fifties, afraid to ask his mother for money. “Does anyone ever answer that right off? Or do all your patients make you work for it?”
