I felt the already freezing temperature drop as soon as the door closed. It was a cold, dark meat locker in the middle of the blazing desert. We were idle carcasses of meat, strung up in the locker until the butcher decided we were ok for consumption. The butcher, who claimed the title of a therapist, was perched in her foam throne with a bright smile accumulated from the pain gleaned from us all.

One blue chair, two blue chairs, three blue chairs, were they even blue? Four blue chairs, five blue chairs, I lost count. Alas, only two of the chairs were actually filled. It was three last week, but I digress. They were filled by the bloodied and drained carcasses of meat that we all were. In my own chair, I was curled up like a poor cat that was fearing their owner, fearing their own life. I was frostbitten, anxious, and fatigued, no better than the cat I was relating myself to. 

One girl, filling a chair as well as the rest of us, was selected by the therapist to share. She didn’t exactly want to, but she was told to obey. And she did. She obeyed. The awkward nervousness clogging her throat stopped her from exhausting her soul. When it left her throat, she talked and didn’t stop. The awkward smile she bore, grinning through the pain of reflection, was mirrored by the therapist as if she was told to mock it. She expressed everything she could remember to us all, us watching as she tore open her ribcage to expose her soul to us. The countless years of abuse and gaslighting came to the surface of her skin as if it was black ink flowing through her veins instead of blood. She turned to the therapist for help. The therapist returned only a smile and a short reference to something we had never heard of. The girl shriveled and closed her ribs, curling up just as I did before.

An air of awkwardness filled our lungs. We sucked in and blew out that awkward, sad air for what felt like an eternity, every second that passed slowing down the next second as if it was an anchor to the ship which was time itself. I dropped the nightmarish black pen and bureaucratic brown clipboard that was given to me to fill out the sheet that advocated for my attendance to the meat locker that held me, and everyone snapped their heads to me as if I had just screamed the most blasphemous claims that could come to my mind, while all I had done was drop a pen.

The therapist got up, staring at me. The eye contact she forced upon us made me feel as if she was pointing a laser pointer directly in my eye, raising the intensity as she stared for longer. She walked towards me and grabbed her bottom jaw with her right hand. She pulled down with an unfathomable amount of force, but instead of tearing off her jaw, she simply…stretched it? She pulled her bottom jaw down, revealing her tongue, tonsils, and throat, slithering as she prepared to feast. She stuck out her forked tongue, gracing it along my skin, breathing the hot air from her lungs into what felt like what was directed at my nostrils. 

She crept forward, wrapping her tongue around my dumb, innocent head. Was it really innocent? I wasn’t sure at that point. I just knew it had hung before. Or, at least tried to. It didn’t really matter at that point. My head was almost fully engulfed in the mouth of the serpent; the only variable now was when she would bite down. I closed my eyes and I braced. I braced. I continued to brace. When I opened my eyes, cowering, she finally bit down. And when that happened, I opened my eyes once more.

I opened my eyes to see a surprised therapist, along with my concerned peers all staring at me. It appeared to me as though they were lasering through my skin with their eyes and hitting the floors with their jaws, but after all, I figured they couldn’t care much. Could they? What would they think of me? I was distracted yet again by a simple light hanging from the ceiling. One turned to me and asked me whether or not I was ok. I uncurled from my stasis with a simple confusion. I recollected the clipboard and pen that I had dropped, apologizing profusely for the interruption. The therapist waved me on and told me not to worry. Then, everything just…kept on.

I was frozen in time until she told us to leave. I didn’t want to, but I did. I opened the heavy metal door and was strewn across the doorway, peering at the center of the thousand-mile long hallway. I strolled along it, attempting to maintain my composure, until I met the door to the outside. I looked out the window and my parents weren’t present. Alas, I still had to open it. I stepped onto the bright, hot sun that was the ground. When I looked back, all I saw was the dark, deep place in the middle of this fiery hell. I looked back and saw a sunspot in the middle of the sun. And all I was was an insignificant flame, nearly extinguished by that same exact sunspot.