I'm sitting in the waiting room at my therapist's office. Shivers drifting down my back, I can tell the couple across the room is watching me. My body wants to get up and leave, but my brain keeps telling me “You need this. This will be good for you.”

     A man walks in dressed in a child's clothes. Hissing and breathing heavily, he speaks with the receptionist. It sounds as though he has a speech impediment. Shifting her hawk-eyed attention from me to him, the woman who can't mind her own business with her husband now rolls her eyes at the off-beat way the child-man speaks.

     Therapists' offices, I think. Never a dull moment.

     My therapist will be coming out to the waiting room to call me back into her office soon. It makes me worry. What are we even going to talk about? I don't have any real, meaningful questions for her, and it's not like she's given me an “assignment” like you see in the movies.

     Keep a journal kid, it'll help with the feels.

     No journal for me. No therapist homework to guide me through the sessions. The last time I was here she said she would teach me different techniques to help me calm down during a panic attack. I haven't had a panic attack since that last (first) session. So what do we even have to talk about?

     Oh right, the R-word. I wonder if she's going to bring it up today. I wonder if she's going to make me talk about it. She probably doesn't want to hear the gory details, but I have so many feelings bottled up inside, and I keep having so many nightmares about that night that she might make me share them because, well, isn't that her job?

     I don't know what to think. I don't know what to expect. And that scares the h**l out of me.

     It's one o'clock. Time for my appointment.