Chapter 4: The Waiting Room
1681 Words
The counseling center was housed in a small building near the edge of campus, the kind of building Maya had walked past dozens of times without really seeing — low brick, ivy along one wall, a discreet sign by the door that simply read Student Wellness Services. She had passed it on her way to the dining hall almost every morning since August. She had never once looked at it directly.
It took her four days to text Theo after the conversation in the stairwell.
Is the offer still open, she wrote, and then immediately regretted the vagueness of it, the way it could mean anything, the way it gave him every opportunity to ask what offer and force her to spell it out.
He replied within two minutes.
Yeah. When?
I don't know. Soon, maybe.
Soon is good. Want me to look up their hours?
Maybe.
I'll look up their hours.
She had laughed, alone in her room, at the easy practicality of it — no questions about why, no reassurances she hadn't asked for, just the quiet logistics of someone making something slightly easier without making it a bigger deal than it needed to be.
They settled on Tuesday at 4 PM. Maya had a free period then, which meant there was no excuse about schedules, no convenient reason to push it to another week, which she realized — once the appointment was made — had been exactly the kind of excuse she'd been waiting to need.
On Tuesday, she stood outside Aldridge Hall for nearly a minute before she made herself start walking.
The walk to the counseling center took six minutes. She knew this because she had, at some point over the past four days, walked the route twice without going in — once on Sunday evening, ostensibly on her way to nowhere in particular, and once on Monday morning, telling herself she was just taking a different path to breakfast. Both times she had walked past the building, glancing at the door, and kept going.
Today, Theo was waiting outside, leaning against the brick wall with his hands in his pockets, looking entirely unbothered by the cold.
"Hey," he said, when she approached. "You came."
"I almost didn't."
"Almost didn't is still came." He pushed off the wall. "You want to go in, or do you want to stand here for a bit first? Both are fine. I have nowhere to be."
Maya looked at the door. It was just a door — glass, with a handle, propped open slightly by the wind, warm yellow light spilling out from inside. It did not look like anything. It did not look like the threshold of something that had taken her four days and two aborted walks to approach.
"I want to go in," she said. "Before I change my mind."
"Smart," Theo said, and held the door.
The waiting room was smaller than Maya had imagined, and warmer — not just in temperature, though it was that too, but in the way it was furnished. Soft chairs in muted colors, a low table with magazines that looked actually read rather than placed for decoration, a window looking out onto a small courtyard with a single bench and a tree that had lost most of its leaves. A receptionist sat behind a desk near the door, and beyond her, a hallway with several closed doors, quiet and unremarkable.
There were two other students in the waiting room when Maya walked in — a girl reading on her phone, completely unbothered, and a guy who looked like he might be asleep, head tipped back against the wall. Neither of them looked up.
Maya had braced herself, she realized, for something — for it to feel significant, for there to be some weight in the room, some atmosphere of crisis. Instead it felt almost disappointingly ordinary. Like a dentist's waiting room. Like nothing at all.
"I have to fill out some forms," she told Theo, after she'd given her name to the receptionist and been handed a clipboard.
"Take your time. I'll be here."
She sat down in one of the soft chairs, the clipboard heavy in her lap, and looked at the first page.
What brings you to counseling services today?
There was a blank line beneath it, generous, several inches of white space waiting to be filled with whatever words she chose to put there.
Maya stared at the line for a long time.
She thought about all the ways she could answer it. She could write something small — stress, maybe, or adjusting to college — answers that were true in the way that the tip of an iceberg is true, technically accurate, revealing almost nothing.
She thought about the panic attack behind the humanities building. About the inventory she ran every morning. About the word fine, deployed so many times it had become a wall she lived behind without ever deciding to build it.
She thought about Professor Walsh's question, which she had now carried around in her head for almost two weeks.
What have you done with it?
Slowly, she began to write.
I think I have anxiety. I've probably had it for a long time — years, maybe — but I've gotten really good at hiding it, even from myself sometimes. Recently I had a panic attack, which I'd never had before, not like that. I don't really know what I'm supposed to say here. I just know that I'm tired of carrying this by myself, and I don't know how to stop, and I think maybe that's what I'm here for.
She read it back once. It was not eloquent. It did not sound like the careful, polished version of herself she usually presented — the version that read ahead, that had answers, that contributed only when the contribution was worth the cost.
It sounded like someone who was tired.
It sounded, she thought, true.
She filled out the rest of the form — basic information, insurance details Theo helped her find in her student portal, a checklist of symptoms that she went through slowly, checking boxes she had never seen written down before, each one landing with a small, strange shock of recognition. Difficulty falling or staying asleep. Excessive worry that is difficult to control. Restlessness or feeling on edge. Difficulty concentrating. Physical symptoms — racing heart, shortness of breath, muscle tension.
She checked all of them.
She had known, in some vague way, that these things were connected — that the 4 AM wakings and the chest tightness and the constant low hum of dread were all part of the same thing. But seeing them laid out on a form, in someone else's clinical language, each one a small box she could check yes to, made the shape of it suddenly, undeniably clear.
It was not a collection of separate problems she'd been managing individually for years.
It was one thing. It had a name. And other people — many other people, apparently enough that this checklist existed, printed and ready, anticipating exactly these symptoms — had stood at this same threshold before her.
She was not inventing this. She was not being dramatic, or weak, or any of the things she had quietly accused herself of being on the mornings when getting out of bed felt like lifting something enormous.
She handed the clipboard back to the receptionist, who took it without ceremony, glanced over it briefly, and said, "Someone will be with you shortly. Thank you for coming in today."
Thank you for coming in today.
It was such a small thing to say. Maya sat back down next to Theo and found, unexpectedly, that her eyes were stinging.
"You okay?" Theo asked quietly.
"Yeah," Maya said, and was surprised to find that, in some strange, tentative way, it was true. "I think — yeah."
A woman appeared in the hallway a few minutes later — mid-thirties, warm-faced, holding a folder. "Maya?"
Maya stood. Her legs felt strange, like she'd been sitting for much longer than she had.
"I'm Dr. Reyes. Come on back."
Maya looked at Theo.
"I'll be here when you're done," he said, already settling back into his chair, picking up one of the actually-read magazines from the table as if he had every intention of staying exactly where he was for as long as it took. "Go."
Maya followed Dr. Reyes down the hallway, toward one of the closed doors, which Dr. Reyes opened and held for her — another threshold, smaller than the front door, but somehow the one that mattered.
Maya stepped through it.
The door closed quietly behind her.
In the waiting room, Theo turned a page of the magazine he wasn't really reading, and settled in to wait.
That night, Maya opened her document and wrote, beneath everything else:
I went. I filled out the form. I checked every box, and it turned out the boxes had names for things I'd been carrying alone for years.
Dr. Reyes said — among other things — that anxiety this persistent, this long-standing, doesn't go away because you finally decide to deal with it. It takes time. It takes work. There's no single conversation that fixes it.
But there's a first conversation. I had it today.
Theo waited the whole time. Almost an hour. When I came out he just said, "How was it?" and I said "Okay, I think," and he said "Okay's a good place to start," and we walked back across campus and it was cold and the leaves were almost all gone from the trees now and none of that mattered, particularly, except that I noticed it. I noticed the cold, and the leaves, and the sky, in a way I don't think I've noticed anything in a long time.
Dr. Reyes wants to see me again next week.
I said yes before I could think about it too much.
I think that might be the right way to do things, sometimes. Before you can think about it too much.
- Writer
