It’s hard to evacuate your bowels in a busy public restroom.You try to do it in those precious moments after men have left and before new men arrive–you are a thief waiting for the security guards to change shifts. You wait in silence, peeping out of the crack in the stall door. Now’s your chance!

But somebody comes in and, the horror, takes up residence next to you. Shit! You’re now in a stand off, listening while simultaneously trying not to make those noises. He is doing the same. His LV belt buckle is resting in a thin pool of liquid, you can see. Sometimes you bend all the way down to investigate the kind of pants the guy next to you is wearing because you have nothing better to do with your time because you didn’t buy an iPhone.

You cough. You figure that will mask the sounds of evacuation, like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when the guy waits until the thunder claps to hit the sewage pipe with his big rock. You also roll the toilet paper thing around and around and around.

Now more men have come in. Shift change over. You missed your chance.

He’s tall and slender and sounds like Barack Obama. So when you’re sitting in his tiny office, you sometimes giggle when he’s talking because it feels like the President is your therapist.

He’s not very good at his job. He takes copious notes while you’re talking, like an overeager college freshman, giving the impression that he isn’t really listening at all. He mispronounces people’s names. He gives you an odd assortment of handouts with graphs and crap on them. You throw them away because, I mean, come on… He’s not even a therapist by trade; he’s an engineer or something, but he was recommended to you because you’re poor and troubled and because real therapists are expensive. See, mental health is a rich person luxury–like golf or litigation.

He cannot not help you, this imposter. Most cannot. Sometimes you wonder what Freud would have said about you, or Adler, or Klein. But then again, you think psychoanalysis is a bunch of fluff, anyways. Somebody told you once that the entire field of mental health is a trite Americanism. She was wrong, of course, but she was also right.

So you make an appointment for the same time next week.