Dark Therapy

8- Aiden

Monday begins the same way it always does. It should feel like any other week, but it doesn’t. I’m in my office before sunrise, reviewing notes, sipping coffee that’s gone lukewarm before I remember to drink it. The familiar pattern should steady me, the predictability, the order I built my life around. But something hums beneath the surface, a shift I can’t categorize yet. It irritates me.

My first patient of the morning, Mr. Dalton, proved to be a poor distraction. He enters loudly, ego-first, recounting a weekend argument he caused but insists he didn’t.

“My wife just misinterprets everything,” he says, arms thrown out dramatically. “I walk in the house, vibe is off, she’s already on some emotional roller coaster.”

I blink once, slowly. “Did you ask her what she needed?” I ask.

He scoffs. “Needed? Bruh, she needs a hobby.”

I’m aware my patience is shorter than usual. The man is exhausting on the best of days, but today his narcissism scrapes at my nerves in a way I don’t care for. I keep my expression unreadable, but internally, I mark the shift, I’m sharper, quicker and less tolerant of unnecessary noise. It doesn’t feel emotional, it could never be emotional, something feels misaligned. When he leaves my office it feels quiet and not in a good way.

Ms. Alvarez arrives next, dark circles under her eyes, apologies spill out of her before she even sits down. “I’m sorry, I know I’m a mess today. I barely slept–”

“You don’t have to apologize, I’ve said this a million times in our sessions.” I tell her “Being overwhelmed isn’t a moral failing.”

Normally, when I say things like this, I feel satisfaction of something shifting in them, an unraveling of guilt and a release of tension. Today feels muted though, the world is one degree off center, as if everything is shifted a few inches to the left. I watch her carefully in my clinical mind but it shifts to something I never allow.

I find myself thinking of Essence not in a sentimental way but thinking back on the tension in her voice. The way she stared at me like she was trying to solve a problem she didn’t know the shape of yet. It’s intrusively taking over my thought processes and annoyingly so.

I recalibrated immediately, returning to Ms. Alvarez with practiced ease, guiding her through the remainder of the session, grounding her, steadying her breath. I say all the right things in the right cadence. She leaves lighter than when she arrived. I should feel the familiar sense of completion.

I don’t.

By midweek, the misalignment hasn’t faded, it’s sharpened. I move through my schedule with efficiency bordering on brutality. A man spiraling because his authority at work feels threatened. A woman asking the same questions she’d asked for months, hoping I would finally give her permission to stay miserable. A teenager blaming everyone but himself for choices he’d already decided not to change. Another woman clinging to a relationship that drains her because loneliness frightens her more than misery.

They talked and talked and all I could think was you already knew the answer. All I hear are variations of the same theme, avoidance, entitlement, fear dressed up as confusion.

My jaw tightens more often. I hold my silences longer. I found myself gripping my pen too tightly. Holding silence longer than necessary. Watching them squirm under it. I wanted—briefly—to strip the pleasantries away and tell them exactly what I saw. To dismantle their excuses. To tell them the truth ruthlessly, efficiently, the way I do when I’m fixing something instead of coddling it.

But that isn’t therapy and I am very good at pretending I’m not irritated. Instead, I grow colder. More distant. The empathy remains intact, but it feels mechanical now, deployed rather than felt. When each session ends, the relief I usually experience never arrives. The quiet afterward feels wrong. Hollow and pressurized, like a room waiting for something to shatter.

By the end of the day my jaw ached from restraint. When I lock my office that night, the quiet doesn’t settle me the way it usually does. My awareness is sharp to the point of discomfort, every movement in the parking garage cataloged, every reflection in the glass noted twice. I don’t feel threatened. I feel coiled. So I abandoned the plan to go home.

The bar I choose is overcrowded, loud enough to drown thought. A club masquerading as a lounge with too many bodies, too much noise, a place where anonymity thrives because no one is really looking. Perfect.

I’d taken in the room with detached precision. Not hunting. Assessing. I wasn’t there to correct anything tonight. The memory of the man’s nose breaking under my fist two days ago—an impulsive, ugly act—flashed behind my eyes, a ghost I needed to exorcise. I didn’t want violence. I wanted release—controlled, contained, uncomplicated.

She approached me instead.

Confident, deliberate, the kind of woman who knows exactly what she’s doing when she closes the distance. A dark dress. A measured smile. Eyes that flicked over me like she’d already decided the outcome.

“Buy you a drink?” she asked.

I glanced at her glass. “I already have one.”

She smiled wider. “Then maybe another one and you can tell me why you look like you’re deciding whether to leave or ruin someone’s night.”

Interesting.

Conversation was minimal. I didn’t ask about her life. She didn’t ask about mine. We exchanged expectations instead, preferences, boundaries, the clear, cold understanding that this was temporary. When I told her what I liked, I didn’t soften it. I watched her carefully as I spoke, measuring her reaction rather than seeking approval. She didn’t flinch.

“That sounds intense,” she said, her voice dropping. “I think I’d like that.”

Good.