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."