In the August of 2013, my therapist taught me how to feel pain.
She sat me down on her couch, put her hands around her knees,
And said that I was ready to learn about the juxtaposition of love and self-degeneration.
She recited to me as I was perfectly amended, and wrote down a scripture on the walls
As I watched from her susceptible whole-draining couch.
I began to litter my mind with an effervescence as she talked,
I pleaded and broke my solar plexus to let it shine within me as she spoke fluently about where I will be in times of darker days.
I listened, and let cognizant dissonance transform into regular dissonance,
As we feuded over some emotions that she claimed to know better than I did.
When the dissension was destroyed with my evenly wild dismantled separation from depersonalization and reality,
She stopped scribbling in her book and looked me straight in the eye.
She asked me how I felt and I told her that I did not.
I told her that I am a vessel for the supremacy of a mind that looks at prominent self-worth
the same way it looks at the particles underneath a shoe or the water at the bottom of an under-gated puddle. I told her that I have never opened my eyes since my father figure transformed into the door I used to hide away the tears of the woman who raised me up. I told her that I am a conundrum with a voice that is shadowed by the memories I witness and replay over and over again but have never actually ...really...experienced.
She looked at me like she expected to hear every word that came out of my mouth.
She was more a carnivore in my eyes, and by the time I realized how much an allure surrounded my depositing of impressions into this woman's central nervous system,
I was already telling myself that I have never really needed sanity.
She professed that the boundaries of my life were created by an inner turmoil,
And I would notice its symptoms and prognosis if I would just open my eyes to its horrifying truth.
By the time the room was filled with lies, I had already told enough truths to let her believe that assistance and recovery were the things I came into the room for.
She told me that I was a functional disorder, and I told her that that was patronization.
At the end of the session, we both seemed to feel equal over the fate of a sequel to a previous encounter with our regular conversational dissonance...
She gave me a piece of paper.
And it became a burden.
With a despondency I created out of her bickering and my dejected submission,
She ended the session and let the emotion run free from the tone of voice she used to impractically aid me.
I picked up the paper and picked up my serenity and created more demons out of the gracefulness inside of me,
"Open your eyes, Mzwandile."
I casted hope upon my pocket, crumpled it up until it meant as much as it usually did,
and exited the room with a prescription for a new life.