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I picked up the stack of pages, leaned back in my rattan chair, and delved into Elena’s darkness. The narrator declared that they had skipped the next therapy session. Their psychiatrist called, but the narrator refused to answer. Hours later, the psychiatrist left a voicemail asking how the narrator expected to improve by hiding in the outskirts of the station, isolating herself. The following day, this psychiatrist sent a message urging the narrator to fight against the parasite at every step. The narrator wrote back demanding to be left alone.

The narrator woke up clutching a bottle, its contents spilled across her chest. A cloud of hate, reminiscent of a swarm of mosquitoes, grew toward her apartment and halted at the front door. The hate seeped through the door and wall, it crept through the ventilation shafts. The doorbell rang. The army of shadows had brought a battering ram.

The narrator hid under the sheets, but the psychiatrist, speaking through the door, claimed to know that her patient was inside. The narrator tossed the sheets aside and slid onto the edge of the bed. Her hangover squeezed her brains. The apartment stank like a sewer. She wondered if she had flushed the toilet.

The narrator was outraged that her psychiatrist had invaded her privacy. A rage flared up in her chest, but it waned with each steady breath. She acknowledged that she needed to see another human face even if it meant asphyxiating in hate.

She opened the door, then hobbled back to the edge of her bed. The psychiatrist wrinkled her nose and tried to ignore the mess. She was wearing a glimmering blouse and glinting bracelets that clashed with the grime of that apartment like a wedding ring fished out of a garbage dump.

The psychiatrist, addressing the narrator as “Kirochka,” urged her to try again. The narrator believed the therapy sessions were useless, because she would never be cured. The psychiatrist conceded that their scientists would have to find a cure, but that Kirochka, parasite or not, had to coexist with others. For now she could afford to seclude herself in her tiny apartment, but this limbo was temporary. Kirochka trembled with anger that reddened her vision. The psychiatrist embodied the overflow of mud that had flooded the corridors of this space station, that had now reached her last refuge.

The psychiatrist warned Kirochka that, as per military orders, she was required to attend therapy sessions, and failure to comply might result in confinement with other detainees. For Kirochka, that meant unending torture, suffocating in a miasma of hate. The shadows would overwhelm her even in dreams. The psychiatrist reminded her of a better alternative: a weekly hour-long therapy session. Kirochka argued that attending therapy also meant commuting through crowded hallways. The psychiatrist eyed Kirochka’s facial scars, then assured the narrator that nothing more would be demanded of her.

I lowered the papers and looked up across the table into Elena’s icy blues. I was struck again by the feeling that I faced an enigma, a person displaced from their proper time and place. And behind those eyes, the mind grown accustomed to the darkness, to the cold touch of loneliness, now bristled in the glare of social scrutiny like a wary, wild thing slinking toward a campfire’s warmth.

“Kirochka has been forced to attend therapy to control the darkness within her. In this story, a literal parasite. I don’t have to wonder what inspired you, given that two days ago you spoke about harboring a malignancy inside you from birth.”

“Though ‘therapy’ implies there’s something to fix, doesn’t it? Kirochka knows better, just like I do. Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be endured. That darkness, that malignancy… it’s not a tumor you can cut out or medicate away. It’s more like radiation poisoning. It has seeped into every cell, become part of your DNA until you can’t tell where the poison ends and the person begins. Kirochka’s therapy is just society’s attempt to contain something they don’t understand. Something that terrifies them because it doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes.”

“The story is set in space? Curious, coming from you.”

“Yeah, in a space station. Maybe the only way to make sense of feeling like a monster is to write yourself into the void. Kirochka… she’s what happens when isolation stops being a choice and becomes a sentence. When your own mind turns alien, transforms into a nightmare world filled with shadows. I suppose the space station is a sort of metaphor: a prison floating in the endless darkness, where the only true company you have is the thing growing inside your brain. A parasite that feeds on your pain, your loneliness, and the hatred of others. It whispers to you at night, saying that perhaps you were always meant to be like this, a monster wearing human skin, and the only way to protect yourself is to hide, to shut out the light and the noise and the people.”

“So the point is that those like the protagonist and yourself are beyond repair?”

“I don’t write stories to make points, Jon. I write them so they don’t explode inside me and scatter their shrapnel throughout my body. Keep reading.”

I lowered my gaze to the text. On the day of Kirochka’s next therapy session, she rummaged through her pile of unwashed clothes: pants that clung to her thighs, t-shirts that stretched across her chest. She wondered how she had ever dared to wear clothes that spotlighted her. She wanted to blend into the throng, unnoticed. She ended up materializing a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, both black. She left the apartment with a bag of her old clothes, which she dropped into the incinerator.

The journey to the psychiatrist’s office made Kirochka feel like she had aged decades. Her trauma isolated her from everyone around her. She longed to be invisible; as she wandered those hallways and corridors, she’d watch others embrace life and look forward to tomorrow, while Kirochka’s future had darkened, tainted like a pool filling with oil. Invisible, no one could anchor her to reality with their gaze, which would leave them unburdened by her scars. For as long as her broken life would stretch out, she’d belong in the shadows.

Sitting opposite the psychiatrist—a well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-spoken woman who likely earned more for handling lost cases—Kirochka argued that it was pointless to expose herself to the shadows that had taken permanent residence in her brain. Instead, she insisted on channeling her energy into her strengths, like drinking herself into oblivion. The psychiatrist countered that her client couldn’t opt for self-destruction. According to the psychiatrist, others lacked Kirochka’s ability to perceive the emotions stirred by the parasite as intrusive, to separate them from one’s true feelings. This insight gave her a fighting chance against the malignancy, and would allow her to integrate with society. It appeared the psychiatrist had screwed up: the narrator wasn’t meant to learn that others had been infected by equivalent parasites. Although forbidden from disclosing this secret, the psychiatrist believed that revealing it to Kirochka would motivate her to fight. Nine others—ranging from soldiers to scientists, and even a reporter—had been affected, while the military suppressed any hint of the crisis. Kirochka burst into uncontrollable laughter, her cackles persisting even as the flustered psychiatrist ended the session.

Three days later, shortly after entering her psychiatrist’s office, Kirochka stole a glance at the woman’s screen, and noticed a waveform jittering with each sound. Kirochka asked if she was being recorded without her consent. The psychiatrist explained that military-ordered therapy sessions required recording. Kirochka pointed to the notes and asked if the psychiatrist planned to write a book based on her observations. The woman admitted it, although she would change her patients’ identifying details. The narrator sank into her chair, exhausted from fighting off the shadows that clawed at her skin. She felt like a paralyzed beast resigned to be pecked apart by vultures. The psychiatrist assured her treatment was meant to help Kirochka recover, but the narrator, in turn, retorted that the woman served two masters.

I flexed the stapled printouts and tapped their lower edges against the tabletop.

“Was this psychiatrist modeled after one you had?”

Elena’s fingertips had been drumming a silent, absent rhythm against her empty glass. She stopped, and her pale blues flicked up to meet my gaze.

“Not consciously, but you’ve reminded me of a therapist my parents sent me to when I was about twenty-two. Every visit cost more than I’d earn in two hard days of work. Sessions that usually started late and ended early, and were interrupted by phone calls. After ten or so episodes of this woman listening to me spill my guts, which made me feel nauseous afterwards, she suggested I’d have no problem working as a cashier. I realized I had scraped my psyche open for someone who was just there to collect a paycheck. Who didn’t care and couldn’t understand. I never went back.”

“You don’t trust therapists, I’m guessing.”

“I distrust their profession. If anyone can be cured by someone listening to their problems and validating their feelings, then they don’t have my issues. And for that matter, any empathetic person lending a willing ear would be enough, not a professional who keeps glancing at the clock and interrupting you to take a phone call. Do psychotherapists exist because our societies are so dysfunctional that nobody talks about anything meaningful?” Elena sighed. “People want to be cured of their suffering, but you can’t undo what’s been done. You can’t erase the scars that have been etched into your heart. All you can do is learn to live with them, to accept that you’ll never again be the innocent child that existed before the pain. You need to find a way to make peace with the darkness inside you.”

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a cover by Melanie Safka.