Meet the Spychiatrist

I explain to my spychiatrist that I think I may have been a coffee-table in a previous life/existence (one can’t call being a coffee-table a ‘life’, so I say life and then add existence as an afterthought).

“Really?” she asks.

The no which I offer is backed up by the explanation that I had wanted to say something suitably interesting to a person in her profession; I fear that if I tell her something as mundane as how I feel she might become bored. I don’t want to waste her time. It tell her that the coffee-table claim had reminded me of the occasion of my First Confession (not that I am a master criminal, it’s just that my parents tried to bring me up as a Catholic): the priest had asked me what sins I had committed, and I had not wanted to waste his time with a list of minor, petty infarctions.

My spychiatrist politely interrupts me with an observation. “You mean infractions,” she says, and then explains the difference between the two. I am too polite to tell her that I am aware of the difference.

During my First Confession, I had been worried about disappointing the priest with a list of minor, petty infractions (infarctions is the better word), and so I tell him that I like trying to bend the pins on plugs, thus making it difficult, though not impossible, to insert them into the wall sockets. The priest had asked me why I did this, which I hadn’t realized was part of the bargain, so I had said the first thing which had come into my head, namely, I don’t know.

I stop talking at this point.

The silence sits there like a poorly constructed simile.

“What happened next?” my spychiatrist asks, but I tell her that I can’t remember.

I tell my spychiatrist that I secretly refer to her as my spychiatrist.

“Do you think that I am spying on you?” she asks.

I explain to her that spychiatrist sounds better than psychiatrist and am just about to add like infarction sounds better than infraction, but I notice the time, gather my thoughts, and leave.

I realize, as I walk to the bus-stop, that I never shared such intimacies with my spychologist.