Day 48 - Sapped Story

Sapped Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Bobbi was sapped.  She felt empty inside.  She wasn’t sad or depressed or even apathetic really.  Certainly nothing that would require medication of some sort.  She had had many pills in the past and knew quite well what many of those felt like.  This was different.  She just felt empty.  Life was passing Bobbi by and she couldn’t muster up one iota of emotion to do something about it.  It would have worried her more, but that would have required some of whatever was missing.

Bobbi had been in therapy. She met with a therapist.  She continued to meet with a therapist. She would go and talk and listen and write things down in a little notebook.  What was in that notebook, she wondered.  What little secrets did it hold?  Judgments and condemnations?  Or realizations and revelations?  They never offer to show you their notes in the notebook.  There must be some sort of power in keeping things secret.

A Life Coach helped Bobbi decide to look for a new job and enroll part time in night classes.  She supposed she should have felt excited and hopeful or at least nervous or anxious.  But no.  None of that happened.  She didn’t feel much at all.

It seemed like that might be out of the ordinary.  She told her therapist about that and he listened and then wrote down some notes in his magic notepad of mysteries.  Nothing was changing and nothing was revealed.

One night in a trendy open market store area with plenty of street performers, a teller with tarot cards called her over with promises to reveal a personal doomsday scenario.  It was, of course, entirely preventable if the price was right.  Bobbi didn’t feel the need to find out or prevent this dreary outcome from occurring, and she certainly didn’t feel like parting with her money.

If she thought about what was going on with her, it was a little bit scary.  She really didn’t care all too much about anything and was unable to muster the energy or desire to care about any of it.  She had heard the terms ‘dead man walking’ and ‘the walking dead’ before, but now these finally connected with her and resonated correct.  Not that she felt like a zombie or someone on death row or that she was a reanimated corpse or any other silly impossibility.  But she identified with the thematic intent of the phrases, or at least with her interpretation of them.  She was still walking, she was still moving, but she was without life.  She was the walking dead.  Any of the emotions or desires or hopes or dreams that make us human and allow us to create and feel the act of living, she was without.  She didn’t know when she lost all that, but she knew and finally realized she had.  All she had now was her next breath and her next step.

For the first time in a long time she had an overwhelming desire – to kill her therapist and read his book.  That seemed like it might hold the secret to everything.  If there was a cure, it was there, in his little mysterious book of secrets.  He wrote down her desires and her dreams and he stole them from her.  All she would have to do would be to read them and they would be hers again.  She could live again.  All she would have to do was take a life to gain a life.

She told her therapist about that and he took a momentary pause and then wrote it down.  She didn’t know how she had made him feel, but she suddenly felt a little bit better.