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.
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