Others twice. “When did this start?” Dr. Rosenblatt, my psychiatrist, asked. I’d been seeing her for my meds for the last ten years or so and it was a relief to get away from Dr. A-Cigar-Is-Not-a-Cigar, who always wanted me to talk to my child-self. I needed help and I needed it then. “Progress” was not an option in my current state. I could pinpoint the exact events. The disappointment over Jeremy, followed by an epoch of self-pity stemming from my inventory of failure. In those couple of weeks, everything except ice cream began to taste like tin and the world oozed humidity and gray. That was the bad news. The worse news was that I’d been assigned two composition classes and had to suck it up four days a week to act like I knew what I was doing. It was agony. “I think your meds have stopped working,” my psychiatrist said. She got up to study my file. “How’s your memory?” I sniffed back the next sob and thought a moment. “I-it’s hard to say. Depression kind of effaces everything.”
