1.2 Sitting at the Doctor's

I studied the round face of the clock, followed the ticking of the minute hand and the slow movement of the hour hand. The walls were an off-colour white, a coffee table positioned in the middle of the room was surrounded by a dozen odd chairs. When I first entered the room I realized I was the only one there. A bunch of magazines cluttered up the coffee table; a sailing journal, a supplement from some paper titled, "How to Look Young in Fifty Easy Steps." I picked up a few magazines just to try to pass the time, but it was useless. I hated the articles they had inside.

I sat trying not to think of thinking, looking at the clock and tracing its every tick. But the more I tried to resist the temptation of holding back my thoughts, the more it became inevitable that my brain was building something up, building up a great explosion of thoughts. My palms began to sweat and my legs started to shake violently.

Don't think, don't think, don't think.

Why are you here? Why is the coffee table of a wood variety? What kind of wood was used? How old is old? Why is love red? Those were only questions, stupid questions that I seemed to have stored somewhere especially for a time such as this. My legs started to shake even more; I tried to resist but it was useless. I sat on my hands, thinking that it would do something to calm me. It didn't.

Light is light and dark is dark. Huh? Such silly little thoughts. Room. I held the thought gathered in my mind and spelt it: R-O-O-M. Perhaps such a word contained an equation, some hidden secret. I thought about it for a second and then jumbled up the words in my head. M-O-O-R. Room spelt moor. It spelt M-O-R-O. Somewhere I had read that the Moro Reflex was a response to unexpected loud noise, or when the infant feels like it is falling. It is believed to be the only unlearned fear in human newborns. There was a study done once called the little Albert study which used the startle reflex in a conditioning experiment to make him fear white fuzzy things. Perhaps something like this had been done to me. Though I do not know what the conditioning could have been, it definitely couldn't be white fuzzy things. I tried to think about it but the more I thought the more confused I became, almost to the point of losing it. Would the doctor hurry up! What was taking him? I noticed no one had entered the room nor left it, and I had been sitting in the waiting room for about thirty minutes, from what I gathered. Either he was with a patient all that time or he was...he was...he was?

"Mr. Bates!" I heard a husky voice shout out from the hall. "Mr. Bates! Doctor Martin will see you now."

I slowly got up, made my way to the door and pushed down on the handle, opening my world to the hall and the doctor who was waiting to tell me the awful news that I was crazy.