Cyma Rizwaan Khan

“Don’t tell me you have OCD about this?”“OCD, ADHD—pretty sure if they come up with some new acronym tomorrow I’d have it.”

“I saw on his face a glimpse of his past. The damage, the unhappiness and the pain, and I wondered what kind of skeletons he has been hiding and for how long. It’s one of those mutual attraction moments that are unexplainable, but as real as anything you’ve ever seen. Almost like my soul knows his soul.”

“When you’ve had a psychotic breakdown it’s always so difficult making that decision. You meet someone new and you wonder how much you should tell them? You wonder what that person’s threshold of ‘strange’ is, and at what point in my story would I end up driving them away. That fear it’s always there in the back of your mind. Those details you never really even admitted to yourself, but that somehow have to be told just as much as they have to be buried deep down.”

“He’s been looking at my file. So the question has to be right there on the tip of his tongue right about now, waiting to be spoken. But he keeps up the ‘act professional’ charade, makes it feel like he sees this kind of thing all the time, but in reality he’s having a little fun with it. I’m the story he’s going to tell at a bar after making my name anonymous. I’m the case study that’s going to become dinner conversation when he takes some rich bitch out next week. He’s going to do it to make himself look well-balanced, prove how normal he is in a world full of weirdoes. In short, he’s going to look ‘normal’ at my expense.”

“They say there’s so much beauty in the world, but I don’t see it. Perhaps that’s my problem. Am I crazy for having major depressive disorder, or is the rest of the population crazy for not having it? How do you even define sanity? Is it the will to live another day in spite of a lifetime of failures? Or is it the desire to keep going after you’ve lost everything you really, truly cared about?”