Bloom Therapy
BLOOM THERAPY;; PG
Her therapist tells her she’s beautiful this one time when she cries at the end of a session. It makes her feel good, makes her snap out of this incessant reverie she’s been in. It’s the therapist who is supposed to be watching her but she is the one laboring over observations for those twice a week hourly chats. Her therapist has this edge about her, mostly revolving around the cut of her hair, barely grazing the end of her jawline, and the way she tucks the front of it like clockwork behind her right ear anytime she asks Hyomin an overbearingly uncomfortable question. She has this bad habit of jutting her jaw out when she writes the notes that Hyomin never gets to read. She’s on the other side of the room; the one with the maroon fringed sofa where she keeps her head plunged on the edge, watching with inquisitive eyes.
“How does the new medication make you feel? Any symptoms of drowsiness?” Her therapist crosses her legs behind her desk habitually and sometimes props her chin on a hand when waiting for Hyomin to answer. She has to wait a lot because it always takes Hyomin a long time to answer, a long time to get her answer to sound just perfect, well rehearsed and coiffed. It never comes out right, it comes out a bit sluggish on the days she follows her medication like a religion and words fumbling on the days she doesn’t.
“I’m feeling worse most days. I think I need to see you more, Dr. Ham.” Lies. Hyomin is good at two things in this world: lying and keeping secrets. (She loves both of them dearly.) One day she sees a personal photo on her therapist’s desk, bending the frame slightly ajar when the other wasn’t looking. There’s a younger therapist in the picture, longer hair, goofy smile, arms wrapped around what could be mistaken for family on a trip. She’s wearing a nametag: Ham Eunjung on an adventure cruise and Hyomin smiles, imagining what it would be like to have permission to call Dr. Ham just Eunjung, familiar and family. They’d travel the world; just the two of them, that Eunjung and Hyomin, those people.
“What seems to trouble you these days and be the most problematic circumstance?”
You.
“Is there anything holding you to a full regression and the inability to move forward?”
You.
“What do you think would be the progressive help to making you feel better?”
You.
Eunjung smiles on the days when Hyomin makes light jokes about what her routine is like; wake up, brush hair, take the dog for a walk, go to the bank, can’t remember where the bank was because of the Zoloft prescription, and when Hyomin jokes, she sees that slight dimple Eunjung gets forming on the edge of her left cheek.
Eunjung taps her pen on her clipboard absentmindedly before jotting down a few notes.
Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.
That’s what Hyomin hopes it says.
“Can I read your notes about me?”
Eunjung smiles like Hyomin made a joke and taps her pen across the bridge of her nose.
“There’s this little thing called doctor patient confidentiality, you know.”
“Well I am your patient and you’re my doctor. Doesn’t that make it confidential between us? I can keep one more than one secret.”
There’s the clock that hangs by the large window that goes two minutes fast. The hands tick each second with a massive existence and the noise is petrifying. Hyomin hates that it can be so distracting and hates that it takes her attention from the pen that is sliding to the back of an ear, getting tangled in the throbs of hair somewhere near.
“I am going to prescribe Adderall in addition to your regular medication. It should help you able to focus a bit more. And I’m thinking it’d be great if we could meet on Wednesdays as well. It’d be an absolute pleasure.”
Eunjung crosses her legs over again, the purple tights she’s wearing bunching up at the brim of her knees. She tosses the clipboard over her left shoulder, left - not right, onto the desk, and takes the pen from behind her ear and bites the cap of it tenderly with her mouth. Hyomin lifts her neck a bit from the plunge of the pillow on the sofa just to feel whatever she’s feeling some more.
“You’re a beautiful girl Hyomin. I want to see you get better for a one hundred percent recovery.”
Legs cross, pen migrates to finger twirls.
“And I want to see you bloom.”
Bloom, Hyomin thinks, is a beautiful word. She etches it into her head over and over, memorizing it just like she memorizes the block pattern of yellow and orange patches on her doctor’s heels as she escorts her out of her office, looking forward to a promising Wednesday full of success, growth, recovery and - blooming.
- i just watched that crazy movie side effects with rooney mara and jude law and got lame.