"You know, in other places - especially America - this's a day to have fun!"
The man was exercised. Or needed exercise, at any rate. He was a grown man, fully bearded, with a very obviously home-made vest over his shirt. Despite this, he bounced up and down in his chair, and his eyes suggested he would like nothing better than to play a game of tag.
"I'm familiar with the custom." The woman who sat opposite him was wearing a suit and a smile. The latter was a sort of lie, but there were generally more opportunities to remove an expression than clothes, in public.
The coffee table between the two was adorned with two decaffeinated drinks. The one beside the man was nearly empty, and its opposite nearly full.
"Everyone out playing pranks, having drinks - it's like they're kids again! But here we are crammed into this
little room!" He bounced from his chair and downed more tea. "Ugh; I hate this stuff. So bitter. Where's the sugar? The milk?"
"You said you liked it earlier, Adam. You know, it's hurtful when you dismiss something that's been made for you." Another half-lie. It was odd how she still found herself disgusted with the amount of dishonesty her career required.
Adam hunched and curled up a bit, and rotated to face away. A black and white photo caught his eye, and he wandered over to it. A man's body, from behind; down to his abdomen. His torso was covered in mud, but he raised a bucket of water above his head, and the stream was washing the grime off.
"It's like 'work, work, work,' and 'sloooowwww down,' and 'stop being alive.' Gotta have a day to wash it all off; get all the...." He wrung his hands. "...words off you!"
The psychiatrist had raised her teacup to sip while he talked, but ultimately stopped halfway and put it down. A familiar process with the bipolar man's sessions. "Do you feel like slowing down equates to not being alive?"
Adam considered - not long - and then said "Well, if you slow down too much, it's basically the same as being dead."
"Is that how you feel when you're not manic?"
Adam stopped moving, having wandered further down the wall. He didn't answer; simply stared at another photo.
"Adam, this is why it's important for you to take your medication. It may slow your more excited moments down, but it also helps uplift your depressive moments." There was a bit of silence, where Adam hugged himself. His posture was slowly crumbling. "Adam, please promise me you'll take your medication. For me, and for your family."
Adam turned his head to peak one eye over his shoulder and look at his doctor. He returned his gaze elsewhere, and nodded slightly.
The psychiatrist felt something that she imagined would've been he urge to sigh, in a more expressive person. Looking at a clock, and that she was ten minutes past the end of Adam's session, she supposed that was the best she would get.
-•-•-•-
Dalia - 4:28pm
Some minutes later, Dalia was sitting alone on a rooftop, with a meal that had been cooked, refrigerated, and microwaved. She understood the comfort and familiarity of leftovers, but did not herself feel it. And she'd already sampled the taste and texture; it was no longer novel. So this was simply a meal of convenience for her, she had decided.
While she ate with one hand, Dalia used the other to employ her phone's web browser. A metaphorical cart for checkout at a shopping site included a new noise-canceller for the door, a supply of paper cups for an severely obsessive-compulsive patient, a new pot for a tropical plant that had been knocked over and put into a placeholder, and some loose-leaf tea for Dalia. Even as she checked over the not-long list and costs, Dalia noticed the flavor of her meal change for the worse. Suddenly, she could taste a smell of distant bodily fluids, covered up by cleaning agents. A hospital, distinctly.
Dalia set the meal down. This was not the first hallucination of one sense or another she'd experienced in the last week or so. It concerned her, of course, but she was unable to think of a cause for it. If it had just been one sense, a diagnosis wouldn't have been so difficult. The same went for the complexity of the hallucinations. A smell isn't anything complex; just the perception of chemicals in the air. But hearing a piano when there wasn't one playing, or seeing the white-clothed, suicidal woman from a dream some days previously, could not be understood so simply.
Now, Dalia was also
hearing the hospital, down to the clacking of computer keys. She turned, and stood on seeing that suddenly on the rooftop, a young Asian woman had appeared, along with what was easily recognizable as a hospital reception desk.
Dalia hummed a thought when they made eye contact. "It doesn't exactly have the plausible deniability typical of schizophrenia," she expressed, looking over the detail of the woman and desk. Not that she'd put much diagnostic stock into that idea; her thinking felt clear and purposeful as ever. Aside from that, she found the incongruity of the sight interesting.
Dalia began walking towards the vision, to see if she could also feel the desk.
