Exposure Therapy

By Anyu Ching

He ordered the lasagna which, to Sharon, initially came across as a little childish and undignified until she realized that if it was truly a childish and undignified order then surely it would not have even been an option on the QR code menu of a restaurant that New York Magazine dubbed “the poor man’s Carbone” to begin with, and so proud she was of this complete self-directed restoration of her companion’s masculinity (within a few seconds too! A personal record her therapist would be proud of.) that she didn’t even notice when the doctor called her Shermaine until fifteen minutes after the fact, and by then it was too late to issue any corrections without revealing that her mind had been elsewhere for the past quarter of an hour, a fact that he would not have known otherwise because Sharon had mastered the delicate art of functional dissociation, a skill she employed both consciously and subconsciously in a variety of settings that included dinner dates but also job interviews, missionary sex, and any kind of instructor-led exercise that required grip socks, which always put her back into the ward, sliding around her room and up and down the hallways as if she were on skates and the vinyl floor an ice rink and the call bells thunderous applause from judges who held up pieces of paper with the number ten printed onto them, raising them up high above their heads, the score cards shooting out from interdigital folds as if the pieces of paper were merely an extension of their palms, like they were always there and would always read ten, ten, ten even if you ran them under water or through gel-slicked hair or slapped them down hard onto the desk, where they would make a sound like someone sticking the landing, like Katie’s body falling off the roof, like a twin-sized mattress hitting the floor.

Anyu Ching is a Singaporean writer and journalist based between Southeast Asia and the United States.

Art by Anjali, a multimedia artist currently based in Honolulu who spends her time dreaming up strange things and giggling.