by Tracie Adams
“Let’s work on breathing,” my therapist chirps. It’s 7a.m. Breathing is all I’m doing. I haven’t had breakfast. My teeth are furry. I lower my laptop’s volume, jolted by her Jersey accent coming through her nose: “inhale, hold, exhale—no, through the mouth, now again.”
“Now let’s do some grounding.” I glance at my sock feet resting on hardwood, but when I look up, her face is cartoonishly big on the screen. I will her with my mind to back away from the camera. That dog she’s “babysitting for her neighbor” hasn’t stopped yapping.
“Tell me what you see and feel,” she says. I smell peppermint, I say, rubbing my aching neck where peppermint oil has scorched a perfect egg shape on my freckled skin. I hear a horse neighing beside my window. I’m trying to think about hay and hooves and happy places. I taste coffee, stale sadness, yesterday’s panic attack at the post office. I see my bed-head hair in the tiny square on the screen and realize I care more about looking good than I do feeling good. I’m not telling her that. She would probably just blink a lot. I lower my expectations and groan inwardly, I feel. I feel. I feel. Can that be enough for today?
“How about some guided imagery?” Her smile is a church marquee, a solar flare, a fireworks show. I look away. Here comes another intrusive thought—Read. The. Room. Don’t smile at depressed people, for God’s sake. Didn’t they teach you that in therapist school?
“Close your eyes. Build a container for your bad feelings.” This time I really try. I picture a wooden box. But when she asks me to describe it, I realize it’s driftwood, and all my bad feelings might leak out. I picture a glass aquarium. Too fragile. Then a metal box, welded edges, padlocked door.
“Perfect!” she beams. “And where is this metal box?”
As she coos, I watch the box slide right off the end of a pier, disappearing into murky water. A bad feeling bobs to the surface reminding me I have a fear of drowning. I interrupt her joy to ask if I should just forget the box and build a bridge instead.
“Even better! Where does this bridge lead you? Where will you go?” She twirls her chair to add a bit of flair to her enthusiasm.
I turn my head, so she won’t see me roll my eyes. But I feel a buzz in my gut. Her question has awakened the dead. I shift my favorite wiener dog pillow away from my back, sit up straight, place my feet firmly on the floor. A bridge rises in front of me, steel and cables climbing in clouds as dopamine floods my nucleus accumbens pathway with a “go explore” signal.
The last image I see is her bouncing and clapping. A cheerleader without the pom poms. As I shut the laptop, she is swallowed by a watery world of pixels, but at least I feel a bit more energized. I close my eyes and lean into wiener dog goose-down bliss, daydreaming of boxes shaped liked suitcases filled with happy things—pineapple wedges and tiny umbrellas and string bikinis for a virtual escape to nowhere.
Tracie Adams, retired educator and playwright, writes from her farm in rural Virginia. She is the author of two memoirs, Our Lives in Pieces (2025 IAN Book of the Year Finalist) and Not Finished Yet (2025 BookLife/Publishers Weekly Prize Finalist). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 and published widely in over 100 literary magazines including Hippocampus, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, Stanchion, and Fictive Dream. Visit tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on X @1funnyfarmAdams and Substack @tracieadams.
Emerge Literary Journal 