Always in nowhere land..

Having been going to a therapist’s appointments for over three years, I have got used to waiting around a lot. I usually go to her office once a week during the winter. However, I must really admit that, for some reason I haven’t been able to figure out yet, she seems to indulge herself by keeping me waiting a great deal of time in the sitting-room. Located in the centre of Barcelona, her office is very convenient since it is just a two-minute walk from both train and underground stations. As I am always pressed for time due to my job as a teacher and my studies at university, I chose this doctor among the fifteen I could have attended. I thought that such a well-located office wouldn’t make me waste my time on long trips to distant doctors’ offices. Yet, attending to her office has somewhat become an ordeal to me

 At first glance one might get the impression that the sitting room is like a cozy and warm apartment. It’s a very spacious square room with soft orange painted walls decorated with posters of Picasso’s cubist paintings, which are framed with glittering thin metal sheets. When the secretary opens the door and asks me to take a seat, I always manage to sit down on the first of four armchairs on the left. Each one has been upholstered with same fabric but in a different color: one is blue; the other one is yellow; there’s a green one too but “mine” is brown. Opposite me, there’s a row of austere chairs. The waiting room has no windows; there’s only the main entrance door and the door on the wall which leads to my doctor’s office.

After sitting there for fifteen minutes, I usually start thinking about how the warm feeling I had at the beginning is turning into gradual suffocation. Then, I take off my coat and look around for a hook. As I realize that I won’t be able to hang it anywhere, my coat usually ends up in the heap of the chairs opposite me. After a forty-five minute wait, I have already reached a point of exasperation. I try to entertain myself with the only magazine around but then I realize I must have read it over a hundred times. Overwhelmed by desperation, I get up and walk up and down the waiting-room feeling desperate for some fresh air. I suddenly remember that there are no windows. The halogen lights spread like a galaxy of stars all over the ceiling make the atmosphere terribly oppressing. It is usually at that point, when I am ready to leave and ring  the telephone hope-line, that my therapist turns up and I certainly feel I have an awful lot of symptoms to tell her about.

Exasperation by Allan Grant