Every Thursday afternoon, I
leave Mr Ikari's maths class and head for the parking lot, where I climb into
my old beat-up car. I put the music at full blast, and I head for the white
stucco building ten minutes away. I park in front of the door, a little bell,
attached to the door by a red string, rings when I open it. The receptionist
gazes from her stack of papers. 'She's waiting for you' she says.
+++
I push the door open; the
glass feels cold under my fingers. "Hi!" Rebekah says, and she
smiles, a bright happy smile, her lipstick a shade too dark. I don't answer, I
crash on the moth-torn couch instead, it's a dark green color, cigarette burns
everywhere on the velvety fabric.I wonder who sat here before me.
I let my eyes wander around
the tiny room; the walls are covered with posters, cheery flowers and smiley
faces, happy children and cute kittens in wicker baskets. "When God closes
a door, He opens a window" on a pink plastic canvas, a tiny house with a
gravel alleyway and flower baskets under each window is stitched under the
saying, probably by a young child, you can see by how irregular each stitch is.
-"Soooo..." she
says, and I know she expects me to answer. I don't though; it's not worth it. I
hear the birds signing by the outside window; I wish I could join them
(Outside... singing... free)
I pass my fingers on the
cigarette burns, where the velvet and the interlining melt in a plasticky
puddle. She allows smoking in the tiny white room, she opens a window so the
small doesn't linger for too long, but somehow a faint odor of cigarette always
remains on her clothes, the scent of a lover, maybe.
The thought of Rebekah
having a lover seems funny to me. She's always busy, always on a run, in
between patients, her desk covered with a pile-up of files, mine carefully set
at the top, open.
-"Do you want to
talk?" she asks, and I nod 'no' I don't want to.
+++
At first, I never talked. I kept my eyes
on the ticking Coca-Cola coke above her desk. She laughed, and said she had put
it there for a reason.
Then, I started to talk. Snippets
from my childhood I thought she might like, psychologists always like when you
talk about your childhood. I told her about my fist bike, about the snow that
always fell in an Odaiba winter... about TK.
-"Were you
jealous?" she asked.
-"No."
-"You were three,
Matt. It's perfectly normal to be jealous of a new sibling at this age."
-"I wasn't," I
say, and she looks at me in disbelief. "My parents were arguing a
lot."
-"Yeah, and so?"
-"I think they thought
TK was a last chance. That's what my father said, 'One last try, Nancy'. I put
all my hope in him. I hoped he'd bring my parents back together, you know... And
he didn't."
-"How did you
feel?"
-"Betrayed."
+++
Then, I started to talk
about more recent things, shocking things that I thought she might like also,
my band, high school, and how Jun was stalking me (This poor girl really hasn't
a clue) Tai, and the practically non-existent relationship I have with him.
-"We used to be so
close." I say, bitterness tainting my voice. Rebekah gazed up from the
file on her desk, and nodded, go on, her eyes said. "I loved him, I think
I did."
-"You think?"
-"I'm never sure of
anything. Too complicated. It might be one thing in the morning, and a whole
different thing at night." I tried to explain to her, but she didn't
understand, I saw it in her eyes. "It's easier to say you're not sure
because then you can change your mind."
-"Ah." she said. "What
happened?"
-"We grew apart."
I said, and she nodded. (I understand.) "I used to stay up late at night
and write haikus to him, silly things about love and butterflies, and the way
his eyes sparkled when he smiled. He never returned the favour."
-"You left him because
of haikus?"
I ignored her. "I went
to every soccer game of his, I never missed one. He never did anything. He
never went to band practice, he didn't come at my father's funeral, he said it
was too painful, he never did anything. I kept the relationship going on my
own, I was too blind to notice it had ended long ago."
+++
I stare at the clock,
Rebekah is doing paperwork, I hear the faint sound of sheets moving around, the
hour is almost over. The birds have grown still, or maybe they have switched to
another tree, thinking the parking lot too close, too noisy. I like to think
they're still here, and they are just waiting for me for the concert.
-"It's over."
Rebekah says, and I turn the doorknob, stopping in midtrack to wave at her. I
walk down the desk of the receptionist, down the waiting room, and I hope the
birds are still waiting for me.
Digimon, its characters and
all related likenesses are © Toei 1997, it says so on my box of action figures. ^^;