Conflict of Interest

Chapter Fifty Four

Carrie

The psychiatrist tapped his pen on his stupid notebook twice before hitting his favorite question.

"How are you sleeping?"

I looked at the wall behind him, unable to fathom the notion that I was here again.

"Have you ever had one of those dreams that you want to wake up from? And then you actually dream that you woke up, but when you try to get up you realize you're still in the same shitty dream? And no matter what you do, you can't get out of it."

He nodded and wrote. "Yes, it's referred to as a false awakening. It's a fairly common phenomenon. How long have you been experiencing it?"

"Oh no, I haven't. I was just going to say that's what these appointments are like."

He looked up at me for the first time in a while, confused.

"You know? I think I'm finally done with them, but here I am, back in this office."

He exhaled profoundly. "Carrie, I feel as though you're hitting a bit of a wall."

"A wall, you say," I repeated, disinterestedly.

"Yes," he said as though I'd meant it. "Is anything else in your life causing you trouble? Family, maybe, relationships?"

I just looked back at him. "Did you just ask if my family or relationships are causing me trouble? Have we ever spoken about my family or my last relationship?"

"Last time we met, you were in the middle of a bit of a break up."

"Well, that bit of a break up was more than a bit."

"And how do you feel now about it?"

"I feel like I did the right thing," I said honestly. "That doesn't take any of the guilt away, if you were wondering."

"Guilt," he repeated. I figured he wanted elaboration, so for once I provided it.

"Guilt about having led her on, I guess. The truth is, I did want to try it with her. Even if part of me knew all along that I was in love with someone else, that part of me knew I always would be. And I really thought there was no way. And it was never wrong of me to try to be in a relationship with someone else if I really didn't see myself leaving her, right?"

"You tell me."

I rolled my eyes, thinking that maybe he was the wall. "I just wanted to hear that I don't suck."

"To be perfectly honest, Carrie, I don't think me telling you not to carry this guilt will do you much good. In fact, I don't think you telling yourself not to feel guilty will take that feeling away either."

"Then what the hell am I supposed to do?" I wondered monotonously.

"It seems to me that you operate out of reason," he noted, not wrongly. "So have you logically evaluated all the premises that would lead you to conclude that you did the right thing?"

"Did you learn how to talk to lawyers by reading an LSAT prep book?" I asked instead. He just looked back at me. "Yes," I finally sighed. "I have."

"And what did you find?"

I shrugged, sighed, and spoke honestly. "That you can't apply logic to love," I said, then hated myself for sounding like a romance novel but continued anyway. "My whole life, I've tried to reason my way out of everything. And up until this point, it's worked. Reason got me good grades, it got me into law school, it's gotten me this far in my career. Now I'm at one of the biggest turning points I've had in a while, and all of a sudden, reason doesn't cut it. I've never felt so empty using logic to problem-solve."