“Do you feel any different?”

“Different how?” 

“Like things are less stark, less destined, less set-in-stone. When you first arrived, you said you felt as if you had no real choices left and that your hand was being forced. Has that changed now that you’ve been here a while and broken some old routines?”

“I mean, I don’t know, maybe.”

“We’ll take a maybe over a no any day.”

“You people sure charge a lot for a maybe.”

“‘Maybe’ means progress. Speaking to me means progress. Six weeks ago you’d have shut this conversation down and sat there until your hour was up and it was time to go back to The Common.”

“Six weeks ago, you people drugged me to the point of catatonia.” 

“Six weeks ago, that’s exactly what you needed.”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Doc, when do I leave here?”

“You know the answer to that, Abner.”

“It’s just, I think I am feeling better, I think I am feeling like I don’t need the rest of the ninety days… I’m feeling like I can go outpatient and that things will be different.”

“When you were checked in, you and your sister both agreed to the ninety-day minimum. Do you know what happens to the people who leave early at the first sign of things getting better? They may last for a bit, but it returns when the honeymoon ends and life has to really begin. The meds will help, but it’s likely you don’t  yet have a solid foundation… to sustain over the long haul. That’s why you agreed to this course of treatment — you recognized the severity of your situation. You’ve walked away from treatment before when one or two things inconvenienced the process. We’ve worked to recognize that as a root pattern: part of the way your depression, and anxiety, and self-destructive tendencies manifest.”

“Have we? Have we really, Doc? Because from where I’m sitting, allowing mental health professionals to cut sessions short, cancel outright, or be overly combative with me is to devalue, like, myself. To question my own ability to hang, outside of managed care, only serves to erode the self-esteem I’ve built, here, over the last six weeks.”

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The irony here is, as you respond to the therapy and the medication and you begin to feel like you no longer need this setting, when everything is back in balance, neurologically speaking, you’ll want to leave. But, in order to sustain that feeling over the long term, I need to tell you, point-blank, that you are not nearly ready to go back to the outside, and in telling you this, I purposefully risk some of the self-esteem you have built. You need to understand that you have a long way to go, Abner, and you should, at the very least, stay for the whole ninety days.”

“Yesterday, they were supposed to serve tacos. I was looking forward to it, and then they just didn’t. They served a build-your-own salad bar instead.”

“I was disappointed as well. Taco Day is always such a treat for everyone.”

“But what? I’m just supposed to sit here and act like you all aren’t in breach of menu, like you aren’t responsible for the repercussions that your actions have on those around you, and like the collective disappointment wasn’t so palpable and triggering that I could actually feel it like a second skin? If you can’t even stick to your word about tacos, then how can I trust your whole ‘ninety days and you're fine’ prognosis?”

“I never said you’d be fine. I said we, you and I both, committed to at least ninety days, and that for the sake of breaking old patterns, it is important that you complete the course of treatment. We’ve been down this road before, Abner. The fact that we didn’t have Taco Day was not a conscious decision designed to elicit a response from you or anyone else.”

“I know it wasn’t intentionally withheld in order to cause a disappointment so palpable that it still hangs around the cafeteria like a poltergeist, but I also know that someone is responsible. I know that responsibility seems to only ever be being taken by those of us who are paying to be here and not by those of us who are being paid to be here.”

“So, let me ask you this: do you suppose you want to leave because you feel better or because you feel like nobody took proper responsibility for the cancelation of Taco Day?”

“Responsibility! Nobody addressed it, nobody even bothered to mention it, they just wheeled out the build-your-own-salad bar like it wasBuild-our-Own-Salad Day all along. Their silence implied that we were the ones that were mistaken and that it was never supposed to be Taco Day in the first fucking place, and that made all of us — every single one of us — sit there and wonder if, maybe we had lost our friggin minds, and that this place never even had a Taco Day to begin with, and that we all hallucinated Taco Day last Tuesday, and that it had always been Build-our-Own-Salad day, but then I checked the menu taped to the wall and it was Taco Day, but still, no one said anything like ‘sorry, but,’ and no one gave any reason why it wasn’t Taco Day anymore. But, incidentally, the Build-our-Own-Salad bar has everything a person would need to make a taco, except, of course, the shell and the properly-seasoned ground beef, but there was chicken, which would’ve worked in a pinch, I guess. So, to answer your question, yes, I am mad about the lack of accountability in this place regarding Taco Day, but, like, also, I am no longer any danger to myself.”