Narcissistic Bitch

by Raina Greifer

You know you’re narcissistic when you keep trying to slyly show your therapist your poetry / She says how are you feeling / And I say I don’t know and we both sit there in silence which is horribly unbearable and embarrassing because it means I don’t know my emotions from my body and so I say actually I’ve been working on this poem oh I don’t know and she says what is it about which sounds like interest / And I love being interesting / So I say well it’s um it’s about a lot of things / It’s nuanced and complex / Which are big poetry words so she knows I’m the real deal / And then there’s silence again / Which makes me think she’s already gotten bored of me / And so I say I don’t know I could like haha read it for you if you want / And she says well that’s not really the point / And I say I think my poetry expresses how I feel pretty well / And then she says metaphors aren’t always the best way to express how you feel / Which means I am annoying her but I can’t stop at this point it would be selling myself short and maybe she’s just nervous that I write about her so I say how would you know do you write poetry? / Isn’t art therapy a thing? / Wouldn’t poetry be considered like a form of revealing art? / And now we are being too confrontational and just staring at each other so finally she says would you like to read it? / And I say only if you want to hear it / And I know she’s thinking why the fuck would I want to hear it / But she smiles because I’m the one paying her and she says sure / But neither of us at this point are sure / And I spend five minutes pretending to get the poem up on my google docs app / But really it’s already loaded on my phone / I don’t want her to know about my unattractive eagerness / The way I hope someone will say my name from across the room like like a need / or how I love the little hands of someone’s thigh hugging against my jeans in an auditorium bleacher / Its narcissistic to be talking about myself / And all I do with my therapist is talk about myself / Finally I announce that the poem is ready and we lock eyes / I read the poem as a dried lemon rolling on the ground / By which I mean my only use is as decor rather than sustinance / Sometimes when she asks me how I feel over our zoom sessions I open a new tab on my computer and quickly search up lists of emotions / When I read off the first few she sighs like a refrigerator unsure of what to feed me /