Liz chose me because I’m cheap. She calls whenever she pleases, because cheap comes with loose boundaries, and I sound annoyed when I answer the phone, as if this weren’t my job. Liz pays for my help, but she’s too dramatic at times, she calls me crying in the middle of the night, she wakes me up, because she needs comfort and sympathy and my sweet little lies about how everything’s going to be fine. I know and she knows she’s too messed up but we both pretend that there’s hope. I, because she pays, and she, because she needs it. I turn on the light to check my schedule, I say, tomorrow at nine, she says she’ll be there, then she hangs up.

She comes at nine thirty and talks and talks and talks and I listen mostly, but also I draw a little house, my dream house, while pretending to take notes. Liz is into poetry. I don’t do poetry, but Liz insists I read what she writes. What her friends write. They all write poems, and I keep thinking about what I should call them. I check my phone for a collective noun for poets while she looks away. A coterie of poets. Such a pretentious term.

Fuck this shit, tell me about your childhood, I want to say, but I don’t speak out, because Liz would claim that’s what she does. She speaks through metaphors and strange words and I’m supposed to decipher the code, which is fucking exhausting. That’s what therapists do, my supervisor says, who plays cool and wise, but he’s too tired to care, he’ll retire next year and he’s already planning to move to a warmer, sunnier, more worry-free climate. Beware of boundaries, he says, but when I set more strict rules, my clients disappear, and he says, no, not like that, because I seem to lack empathy and my clients see through me, but what he actually means is that I’d be able to set boundaries if I were rich enough, like he is.

Liz talks about Alex and Mike and Kate and Tori, who are her roommates and friends. A gaggle of poets, I think. I write it down. Her friends are complicated but also simple. They are a mess too, the kind of yarn that’s impossible to untangle. They could do drugs. Instead, they write poetry. Some do both. All are in therapy and medicated, Liz says. Then she talks about how he made out with Kate, Alex, I say, no, Mike, she says, and I nod, while he was with her, she goes, you mean Kate, I say, but again she goes, no, you silly, I mean Tori, and again I nod, pretending to take notes, then she goes silent and it takes me a while to notice, but she notices and says, someone’s not paying attention, and I lift my eyes and stare like I can see into her soul, because that’s what I’m trained for, but she sees through me, she can tell I don’t care, which is unusual, most people can’t tell because they settle for less, and also believe in purchased attention.

Liz seems to have forgotten herself, like she’s deep in thought with her eyes on me, looking at me but not seeing me. I don’t mind much, except when her phone starts ringing. I rise, approach, and snap my fingers to wake her up from her daze. She startles and jumps out of it. She’s holding her phone and frantically taps on the screen, until the ringing stops. That stupid thing froze again, she says. Hey, let me have a look, I say, and she hands me her phone and I fix it, because I’m better at unfreezing phones than people, people resist my efforts. I smile and she smiles back and I think we’re thinking the same thing, that unfreezing people is harder, but Liz says, you’re that kind of person, she talks with certainty, like she knows me better than I know myself. She believes I know everything about phones, that I can make one from scratch, which is a good skill in case I time travel by accident, because I love my life, but I wouldn’t want to go through all this shit again to get here. I laugh politely. She shrugs. She’s not joking. I put on my serious face and tell her she has a point, but all good things take effort.

It doesn’t take long before things get out of hand. My job is to ground her, to expose the truth and help her deal with it, and that’s what I do when, two sessions later, I say that Tori won’t ever choose her, but Liz can’t take the rejection, she’s too deeply in love. She shakes her head in denial and I’m too tired to be patient when I tell her that it isn’t her choice, that she can’t choose who will love her. She says she can choose, that she has the right to choose, and she screams, I choose, I choose, I choose, but what she means is that she chooses ignorance, because she’s been taught ignorance is bliss. A herd of poets, I think while I do my best to reverse things and calm her down, but fuck, I’m wrong and she’s smart, she can’t unsee what she’s seen.

It takes a couple more sessions before I see that Liz has the spark. I can tell them apart, those who shine, and those doomed to live lives unchosen. She may be trapped, but she’ll be brave. She’s with Alex, and he proposed, but she fancies Tori and it may not work out with Tori, but it will work out with someone, I swear. She’s mastered detachment and at first she watched herself from afar. Like an out-of-body experience during which she turns into me, into a therapist and she can cure herself better than me. But she got even better and she not only watched herself but also the world. And she sees clearly from afar, she can fly over rooftops, through black holes, she floats in space and she observes. Then she sits and writes poetry with her friends. A society of poets, not dead though.

She’s obsessed with the historians of the future now, not with Tori. She and her friends are frustrated with the state of the world. She talks about how future historians will be amazed at how we glorified actors who chose to play in movies that perpetuated the narrative of our oppression. Most people wouldn’t notice that. Most people just watch movies, enjoy movies, then forget about them. A narrative of poets, I write down, but still I ponder. There may be a better word.

Liz even historicalizes the present. She watches it as history unfolding before her eyes instead of living it. She wonders what the soundtrack is or will be. That sharpens her senses, she looks for sounds that might one day remind her of the moment. She could choose the music, but she doesn’t. She prefers spontaneity, but also I think that she thinks she can’t influence the present, the way you can’t influence historical facts, like she’s unwillingly resigned to a present unchosen, because she’s convinced there’s no alternative. What’s the name of the band, she asks, when she hears the music. That’s it, she says, when I say it’s Rage Against the Machine. A band of poets, I think to myself.

Two weeks later she comes back and hands me a poem she wrote. She’s over Tori now, she ended it with Alex. I ask how she feels and she says, fine. I read the poem and I tear up, because I expected some ranting about love lost, but I see a manifesto about a better world. A rage of poets, I scream, a ray of hope sneaking into my brain. I lower my eyes, write it down and say, our time is up.

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist from Athens, Greece, and the author of “We Fade With Time” and “Christmas People” by Alien Buddha Press. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominated writer, her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as the Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and others. She’s the flash fiction editor of Blood+Honey and the Argyle journals.