I felt the edge of my calendar at the bottom of my purse and pulled it out. Tissue lint had collected under the plastic cover and in the month of May, I had a date with an oblong character with one eye in the middle of its face and morbid limbs scribbled in green crayon. The boy child. I laughed as I traced my fingers down to the last week which confirmed that I had the right date and the right time.

It was still very unusual that there was no one in his office at 2:30 in the afternoon.

I shrugged my shoulders and took a seat. I diverted my attention to the gold framed picture on the wall.

It reminds me of the 80′s with its pastel hues. It would have been something that my aunt would have hung in her house because she was a ma-ma-ma-material girl with a badly teased perm.

I’m not sure how one acquires such voluminous height. I imagined that it involved a ladder, Aqua Net, and “She’s a Maniac” playing in the background.

You’d have to be if you’re smoking a dart while engulfing your coif in flammable hairspray.

Off to the right of the picture, there is a partial view of a quaint white house with a perfectly manicured garden of cascading flowers on a trellis. It isn’t anything like my yard. My yard is more of a “Oh, I see you have a kid and a dog as evidenced my the shit on my shoe. And why does your neighbor have an odd obsession with solar lights. Aren’t you worried that a plane will mistake it for a runway?”

The painted house is more “Hey, let’s drink champagne and talk about how our flabby thigh skin was removed and stuffed into our lips. And man are they chapped. Wait…chaffed. Mewha ha ha money.”

We would never be friends.

My psychiatrist, Dr. B, poked his head around the doorway and signaled me to come in.

“So how are we?” Dr. B said as he followed behind me.

I wished that I could have explained how I felt in words. I pressed my hands over my chest as if I were about to give myself CPR.

“I feel like there is this pressure. An uneasiness that comes with the weather shifts, certain smells, and sounds. It makes me physically ill. I hate going outside because it all triggers this, this dark heaviness that weighs down the air. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t know what is happening.”

Without any hesitation he said, “Posttraumatic stress disorder. Everything that has happened to you, the rash, the PPD and so on, have all started here. You’re remembering all of–”

Over and over and over again. 

My present is colliding with my past.

A lost soul casted in the middle of a twisted nightmare without an exit.

I’m terrified of what was and what could be.

“You’re right here. This is now,” he said.

If this is right now, why won’t all of those emotions associated with the atrocities let me go?

Am I holding on to it?

I took a deep breath and exited his office. Before I reached the wooden door that led out into the hallway, I caught a glimpse of the gold framed picture. I somehow knew that this was where I needed to start in order to make it through this.

When I got home, I grabbed my shovel and knelt down in front of my garden. The smell of the soil and the hot sun on my back began to make my heart race and my chest close in.

This will pass. This will pass. That was last year. This is right now. This will pass.

Then I dug my hands deep into the earth and cried.

When I was done, I wiped my nose with the only clean part of my arm and looked out to my yard.

It’s not as fabulous as I want it to be right now, but it will be.

And when it is, it will say, “Oh I see that you have a kid and a dog as evidenced by the shit on the side of my shoe. How does your garden ever survive? Paws trampling on the delicate flowers. The onslaught of soccer balls. Is that a trench full of army dudes in the soil?”

I’ll smile kindly while scanning the blooms that I had worked hard on to make them grow time and time again.

“I nurture it now so that it can be stronger tomorrow,” I’d say.

“It always survives.”