Sessions: 5

"I'm going to become a cat lady."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm going to become one of those cat ladies, I know it.  I'm going to die in my apartment at thirty-five, surrounded by cats and ad campaigns."

My therapist shifted in her seat.  I noticed she shifted a lot.  Or maybe it was just me that made her do that.

"The only way that you're going to become a cat lady is if you let yourself become a cat lady."

I looked past her and noticed a bug on the wall, crawling across the top of one of her diplomas that was framed so pretentiously on the wall.  It was one of those stink bugs; the brown kind that seems to infest every wall of the city once spring hits.

"Have you thought more about my suggestion to take a vacation?"

The bug got to the corner of the frame and slipped, dangling for a moment before composing itself and continuing carefully down one side of the diploma.

"There are some great time shares this time of year that you could look into.  Just the other day my cousin found a fantastic deal to St. Thomas."

Around the bottom, up the other side...

"Would you be open to a singles cruise?"

...now clear across the wall to the window...

"I think I know someone that met their husband on one of those cruises actually."

...then disappeared into a crack along the base of the window pane.

I focused my attention back to the lady with the clipboard and squinted my eyes at her.

"I don't get it.  Why are you so obsessed with finding me some guy to date?  I'm perfectly fine on my own."

"I just thought it might help your boredom and also help you lighten up a little."

I scrunched back into the couch and crossed one leg over the other.

"You're awfully blunt for a therapist."

Sessions: 4

I wouldn't say that I'm a workaholic.  I would just say that it takes up a lot of my time which is good because that leaves less time for me to spend with myself.  I get home form work every day (except for Wednesdays, of course) at around 6:30 and go straight to the phone to order dinner.  I don't cook- not even a little bit.  I used to know how to make instant oatmeal but somewhere over the years I lost my knack for that too.  So takeout has become my best friend.  Well, actually delivery men have become my best friend.  I order my food and then while I'm waiting I flip on the TV- it doesn't matter what channel because I never actually watch it once I turn it on- and continue working on whatever project I brought home from work that day.  I realize this may be some peoples' definition of a workaholic, but I do draw the line somewhere.  I don't work on weekends.  Well, Sundays.  Most of the time.

I once dated this guy that lost his job pretty late into our relationship.  We were together for about seven months and come to think of it, I think it was my longest relationship ever.  Regardless, around month six, his company was on the verge of going bankrupt and he was one of the unlucky employees they let go.  He quickly ran out of rent money and asked if he could move in with me.  Now I have since come to realize that having a fairly serious boyfriend move in after so many months is quite normal.  But at the time I was appalled at the idea.  Having to share a bed- let alone a bathroom- with another person day in and day out put me on the same anxiety level as spending a weekend alone with my mother.  Or my therapist.  So I told him no, he could not move in with me.  I was shocked at how upset and offended this made him.  So we stuck it out for a couple more weeks and then just kind of stopped calling each other.  He ended up moving back in with his parents.  I'm pretty sure he's still there.

Sessions: 3

Coming home from that therapy session, I cannot for the life of me get a cab.  Usually I'm pretty good at it; I've learned how to work my built-in abilities as a natural blonde.  I'm hot and smart, hah!

But today, no today it just isn't happening for me.  I must have been standing on this sidewalk for fifteen minutes, one foot in the street, the other balancing on my tiptoe in an effort to make myself look an inch taller as if that would help.  I finally find some guy in a business suit carrying a brief case to step in the street and hail a taxi for me.  I don't know what it is about those briefcases, but cab drivers flock to them like they're filled with bricks of hundred dollar bills wrapped up in rubber bands.  

So I get in the cab and tell the driver my address.  About three blocks down I lean forward and tap him on the shoulder.

"Hey, do you know who sings that Fourth of July song?  Is it Boston or Chicago?"

The driver looks back at me with a blank expression.

"Ok."  I lean back in my seat and turn my attention out the window.  There is a smear of bird shit on the glass, right at eye level.  The white glob had run down the length of the window and settled at the bottom.

"Must have had some of my mom's lasagna." I mutter to myself.

The cab drops me off in front of my apartment and I stuff my money into the grimy plastic bin attached to the back of his seat.

"Have a nice day." I tell him, grabbing my purse and stepping onto the street.

When you move to New York, you always have the same image: living in a big beautiful apartment building with a doorman and bright red carpet leading up to the front doors.  A blue awning with the name of your place sprawled across it in gold cursive hides the entrance from the vagabond sun because god forbid any daylight enters the fluorescently-impaled lobby.  What you really get is a six-story walk up that's placed between a band of dumpsters and a place that collects and disposes of dead pigeons found on the sidewalk.  I don't open my windows very often.

I live on the fourth floor so I get the pleasure of being sandwiched between two pretty horrendous living situations.  The lady below me in about ninety years old and is practically deaf.  She therefore feels the need to turn her TV up to its highest potential; especially during those paid programming shows where a group of old ladies in hoop skirts sing about losing their dear Johnny when they were young and in love.  Above me are two teenagers who I'm assuming thought they were too cool to live with their parents so they somehow found a way to rent the apartment above mine where they have loud, animalistic sex about three times a day.  I'm tempted to offer them a job at my company just to get them out of that damn apartment for a few hours a week.

Wait, earlier I was saying how I'm a joyful little pessimist, blah blah blah.  Somewhere in between getting a great job and obtaining a pretty steady rotation of Wall Street yuppies in and out of my bed, I decided I was unhappy.  I don't know what it was, I just couldn't get rid of this ugly lonely feeling that seemed to constantly be punching me in the face.  I mean, I would never really consider myself an overtly spunky little creature, but I was never that kid in high school loading on the black eyeliner, scratching away angrily at a journal full of newspaper clippings and punk rock song lyrics.  Like I said before, I was kind of just that self-inflicted quiet kid.  You don't bother me, I don't bother you.

I guess it was about a year after I moved to the city that I decided to jump on the therapist band-wagon.  I was fairly against it at first; I'm not a huge fan of someone telling me my faults, especially a stranger who I'm paying.  It was actually this woman at work that convinced me to do it.  She and her husband had just gotten divorced and now she was stuck with a three year old who apparently was quite the little terror.  Anyway, she was telling me about this woman whose office was about three blocks down from where we worked.  She had all these degrees and awards and was supposed to be actually pretty good.  So I set up an appointment and gave it a shot.

This poor woman has now been putting up with me for four years and god help her, she's sticking in there.  The first couple years of our sessions consisted of me letting up very little information.  I would give her specifics, like a boyfriend that had done me wrong or how to deal with the Sex Olympics that were happening above my apartment every day.  She was pretty good with these kinds of things; she could offer up solutions to the centralized problems.  But as I grew accustomed to having this woman peer inside my head, our session quickly turned into me rambling on and on about how unsatisfied I was, although with what I wasn't sure.

"I'm just so bored." I told her one day.

"Bored with what?"

"I don't know.  Everything.  Everything is so monotonous.  I need some variety."

"Why don't you take a trip?"

"With who?  I'm not exactly overflowing with friends here."

She sighed and gave me one of her smiles.  I could never tell if they were out of sympathy or pity.

"Sunny, have you even tried to make a long-lasting relationship out here?  You've been in the city for five years; eventually you're going to need to find something else to do with your time than go to bars."

I felt myself getting defensive.

"I know people; I just don't enjoy any of them enough to go on vacation with.  Besides, I don't have time to take off from work."

Sessions: 2

Growing up my mom told me that I was just like my father.  Just like my brother, I was just like my father.  I think she was upset that no one in our family resembled her, physically or emotionally.  She's Italian, with olive skin and jet black hair, and those eyes that I assume people describe as almond.  Now, my dad and my brother and I, we're Ukrainian.  We're fair-skinned with blond hair and blue eyes.  Mom's even tempered and cheery, always whipping up some kind of dinner that sits in your stomach for the next two days like a pound of bricks.  My dad, brother, and I?  We're moody.  Moody and closed in on ourselves and, being the girl, I took it upon myself to spend the majority of my teenage years trying to be anorexic.  It never really worked out the way I planned.

We used to have a dog that had brown hair and she was always jumping around wanting someone to pet her or feed her.  Whenever my mom would start complaining about no one in the family being like her, we would point to the dog and continue on our mopey way.  I didn't grow up in a bad household.  My parents never got divorced (although sometimes I think they should have), no one ever hit me or even grounded me for that matter.  We always had food on the table and every summer we were able to save enough money to spend a week on the Jersey shore; beachfront house and all.  It was a typical childhood; all that was missing was a white picket fence and saddle shoes.  All things considered, I should have turned out normal like my brother; my physics professor brother who teaches at a university downtown and lives with his girlfriend of god knows how many years.  They just bought a cat because she loves cats.  I'm allergic to cats so I have yet to visit their apartment since Snowball entered the picture.  Who the hell names their cat Snowball?

So yeah, word on the street is that I'm pessimistic with the possibility of self-destruction.  My parents had the misguided foresight to name me Sunny.  Fortunately, they spared me the torture of it being a nickname for Sunshine.  Apparently my grandmother on my mother's side, her nickname was Sunny because she was just the jolliest woman around.  

When I was eighteen I went to school in the Boston area; just a small, little liberal arts college that didn't do much good for me.  I took a lot of art and poetry classes, and one of my professors told us one day that if you want to be a poet, go into advertising.  It's simply industrial poetry that actually makes you money.  So that's what I did.  The afternoon I graduated, I packed up the tiny two bedroom apartment I shared with three girls and moved to New York City.  Cliche, I know, but money motivates me and I wanted to get right in the action.  Somehow I managed to get an internship at this place that handled a lot of those infomercials you see at three AM on channels you didn't even know existed.  The head boss of the place was a heinous bitch which worked out fantastically for me.  We got along great.

So that's where I am now.  I've been here for five years and logistically speaking, I've set up quite a nice little life for myself.  I have a decent sized apartment which I live in by myself with the exception of a fish tank a friend pawned off to me a year or so ago.  I keep my extra rolls of toilet paper in it.  I'm still doing the advertising thing.  I don't mind my job.  Waking up at the crack of dawn doesn't exactly make me dance around with happiness but I manage to drag my ass out of bed every morning at five-thirty.

Since I live by myself and have surely come off as sufficiently bitter about life in general, a question I'm sure you're dying to ask is, Hey Sunny, do you have any friends?  Well, it depends on how you define 'friends'.  I have acquaintances, most of whom I met at the bar I frequent down the street or at work, and I do have a pretty close relationship with some cousins back home.  You know, I guess they're my girlfriends who, if I was thirteen, I would paint their toenails and than have a pillow fight with.  Now as for boyfriends, the situation's not any more interesting.  I'm not opposed to getting drunk enough that I bring home a random guy to sleep with and then kick out the next morning.  I'm not looking for a relationship right now and I have a whole freakin drawer full of condoms so I don't necessarily see anything wrong with this.  I've had a handful of flings since I've been in the city, usually lasting no longer than a few months.  And have I ever been in love?  Well, I never really took the time to think about it.

This is boring, right?  It has to be, I'm getting bored and it's about me.

Sessions: 1

Wednesday at six.  Every Wednesday night at six o'clock I am here for two hours to listen to her tell me what I've done wrong and why I've done wrong and who I've done wrong.  But of course, the ultimate person I've done wrong is myself because according to her, if you can't make yourself happy than can you really make those around you happy?  If this is true then everyone must be fuckin' miserable because I've been around a lot of people and I'm still coming here very week to sit on this sticky leather couch, telling some certified stranger all about my sticky little life.

"What do you think you can do to better yourself?" she asks me, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees, a look of I-work-on-emotional-commission concern spreading throughout her face.

What can I do to better myself?  I could take the three hundred dollars an hour I'm paying you and go buy some shoes and a handle of vodka.

She starts going off on some lucid rant about the steps I can take toward a more enjoyable future.  One filled with independence and commitment and lollipops and rainbows.  I try to listen but I just can't get this damn song out of my head.  What makes it even worse is that I can't for the life of me think of the title.

'Saturday, in the park, I think it was the Fourth of July...'

"-So you see, if you can just write down one thing you want to accomplish every day, and then steadily work toward that goal, I think you'll find your days much more fulfilling, I really do."

She seems to be done talking, or at least is offering a delayed pause which implies it's my turn to speak.

I focus my gaze on her and frown.

"Who sings that Fourth of July in the park song; Boston or Chicago?"

"Excuse me?"

"I always get the two of them confused.  You know, 'Saturday, in the park..."

"Sunny-"

"...I think it was the Fourth of July..."

She gently places her clipboard on the end table next to her cushy velvet armchair and leans back, crossing her legs.

"Sunny, I'm really concerned about your progress.  You don't even seem to pay attention to our sessions.  Why do you even bother to come?"

I lean back as well, crossing my legs just like hers.

"Now there's a question to analyze."