She is scrawny, strands of dirty blonde hair pulled down straight in a ponytail, flung back over her gaunt skull. She speaks in a muted, mumbled stream, her voice trailing off at points while she stares into the middle-distance, waiting for her thoughts to catch up to her tongue.
She hands me sheets of paper; forms for doctors, forms for medicine. It's an elaborate plan for such a frazzled person. Cutting paper from here and sticking it there, scanning this and copying that. It seems beyond her at first; she's a two finger typist and dulled by whatever is partying in her system.
After an hour of back and forth she is done. Anxious calls over a battered mobile ensue, arrangements are made - appointments pushed back.
I had found myself treating her with mild disdain at first - but as she continued pursuing her goal I relaxed my self-righteous and became empathetic to her cause.
Just before she leaves I hand her one final document, a letter from her psychiatrist. She looks at the page with a sudden focus, jarred from the blanket of dope she is hiding beneath. The woman finds herself staring at a synopsis of her life - distilled to a minimum of symptoms, and the situations that provoked them.
...Borderline personality disorder...acute anxiety disorder....radical surgeries...deaths of siblings...aversion to doctors....death could have been avoided....mental disorders...
She lifts her head from the page - shocked, numb.
"I didn't realise what they'd written. I was so focused on typing it - making sure the spelling was alright - I didn't know what she'd written about me."
I watched her read her life story. It was a pause in the journey - a brief reflection - the knock of reality.
And then she left.
