Chapter 13 - Chapter 12

"So tell me a little about yourself."

Seriously?

"Uh, what do you want to know?" I ask the psychologist sitting across from me in a leather recliner identical to the one I'm sitting in.

"The intake form you filled in told me a lot about the things that have happened to you," Dr Mngadi says, resting his elbows on the arms of the recliner and steepling his fingers. "But not much about your life, if that makes sense."

"If the intake form told you what's happened to me, don't you then know about my life?"

Dark brows rise above his black-rimmed glasses. "Not necessarily. Someone else could have lost both parents at a really young age, lost the woman who raised him, lost a child and a marriage, all in the space of a year or so, and processed it completely differently. There are infinite doors to choose when we lose things and people that are important to us. A million ways to grieve. I'd like to know which doors you chose."

A harsh chuckle rattles in my throat at his unaffected cataloguing of my life's shit luck. "So we're just diving in, huh?"

"I'm a good judge of people," Dr Mngadi says with a smile. "I sense you're a man who likes to get right to it."

The locs hanging to his shoulders are peppered with grey, but the face they're pulled away from is relatively unlined. He's probably not much older than I am. I take in the African masks and art decorating the walls, certificates and degrees hung in the gaps between them. "I see you're a Fort Hare man." I study the undergraduate degree. Bachelor of Arts, Psychology.

"I am. You?"

"I was there, yeah. Business degree."