It’s funny, I spent so much time watching them with the roses, but I couldn’t imagine what they were like inside their house. If the mother maybe whispered terrible things to the little boy once the door was closed. Or if she made him his favourite dinner every night. I couldn’t imagine it! Anyway, later the boy chopped up all the roses into tiny pieces with his smaller shears. I know because I watched him do it through my pink curtains, crouching on my bed.

You know I’m sorry really, to talk to you like this, perhaps you’d like it quiet. As quiet maybe as if we had all been painted up into a picture and our lips couldn’t move anymore ever, as if our mouths had dried closed. Perhaps you’d like that. There.

Oh but I can’t just sit here and be quiet! It feels so unfriendly. Is it silly that I feel like a hostess when you come in? It also feels like I’ve got something trying to crawl out of the front of my skull. Something pushing at me from the inside. Some awful wildness. But perhaps that’s more to be expected in a place like this. A home like this I should say, considering we have a window.

Let’s pretend everything was otherwise. Let’s pretend we have nothing behind us. See? A game.

I will say, when you come in, into my room in this house, I will say, But where are my manners? Like this, with my hand here. And then I will say, Here, let me take your coat. Let me bring you a drink. Let me tuck that piece of hair back behind your ear because we’re friends, best friends even, and it’s nothing, really nothing, if I touch the side of your face with my fingers.

If I laugh a bit and dust a piece of something or other off the shoulder of your dress. If I lean into you just a bit if I’m jittery or tired. See? Because we’re just like that, aren’t we? We don’t have to be too careful around each other.

They tell me I must talk to them in order to make progress, so perhaps it’s right, perhaps I’m doing the right thing by talking to you. Do you think so? Only they tell me too that there’s a right kind of talking. That there are things I need to talk to them about. I laughed and tried to make them laugh, just to try and lighten the mood, do you see? It’s so serious in there, in their office with the heavy chairs and me with these silly old cuffs around my ankles. Clunking and hissing. Swishing like the bottom of a ballgown maybe, against an oiled parquet floor with wax as thick as ice. Lord we know what we are. But not, oh how does it go? Anyway, in there I seem ridiculous. I feel it. They don’t laugh though. They only give me more pills, more appointments, and scribble down my jokes into their grim black notebooks.