"There is only nope."

“Please answer questions as completely as possible. Do not use one-word replies. Be clear and concise. Avoid hyperbole and idioms.” That’s what the initial email had said. Along with the rest of the fine print about payments and a privacy form she had to sign with her name between two // which she was pretty sure wouldn’t hold up in court.

It had taken a lot for her to get here. Long, lonely nights. Days that passed like a blur. Even when she drank too much java, she fought a lack-of-caffeine headache that never left. Her life sometimes felt as if she were on a tilt-a-whirl at an old-fashioned amusement park. She walked on her tiptoes. Didn’t ever put any weight in her heels. When a big wind blew, she worried she’d be swept away like Dorothy or her house.

She had confided in her best friend, her step-mother, the clerk at the dry cleaner when she’d brought in her favorite pair of trousers after she’d sat in pink bubblegum. Sometimes she’d find herself chatting with strangers on a bus, telling them things she had never thought she’d say aloud to anyone. That’s how she knew she probably needed professional help. The moment when a man in a stained trench coat got up, and she thought he had reached his stop, but he’d simply reached his limit of her and was moving to a different seat.

She both dreaded and looked forward to the first appointment. Dreaded because there was still something inside of her that wanted to pretend she was okay, she was fine, she had everything under control. Looked forward to because, hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Maybe she’d feel better. Maybe she’d have a story to share at her favorite pub after.

At the assigned time, the assigned date, she poured herself a cup of tea and sat at her lemon-yellow kitchen table with her computer open. She had to enter her details and a code that proved she was she. Then she was looking at an empty dialogue box. She waited until the therapist had joined the chat.

“Hello,” he said.

“I’m not sure how this works,” she typed.

The reply was quick, almost too quick. “This works however you’d like it to work.”

I would like this to work so I don't talk to smelly strangers on buses, she thought. But she wrote, “Do you ask me questions? Or do I just type?”

“Would you like me to ask you questions?”

She thought about that for a moment, then she wrote: “I haven’t been feeling myself lately.”

“‘Self’ is an interesting terminology. What does the ‘self’ mean to you?”

Just her luck. He was Freudian. She tired to remember the difference between Id. Ego. Superhero. No, wait. She’d flunked out of psych grad school, and all she could really recall was Maslow’s hierarchy and the thing about imprinting with geese. Or was it swans? Ducks. Did it matter? She’d dropped out because she didn’t really think she’d be able to help other people when she couldn’t figure her own life out, and now look at her. She was working at a copy shop, had recently killed her last relationship along with a row of cacti on her window sill, and she hadn’t washed her hair in nearly a week.

“What I mean,” she typed slowly, “is that I have lost who I was and forgotten who I want to be. And I don’t know how to get back.”

“Who were you?” The words appeared almost as soon as she was done typing.

Who was she? “I was 29. Grad-student. I read all the time. I had at a job I thought I liked. I had people I knew who I thought were my friends. And now when I look in the mirror, I don’t even recognize myself anymore.”

“Who are you?”

Did he mean externally or existentially?

She was an hourly clerk who worked at the last copy-shop in her city. Chain-smoking on her breaks. “I’ve got dirty blonde hair,” she wrote, “and I mean dirty and blonde. Not dirty blonde the color. I’m thinnish. Punkish. I wear all black clothes and knee-high Docs.”

“What does wearing all black clothing mean to you? The color black can indicate mourning.”

“I am sad. And I am stuck.”

“Where could you go so that you wouldn’t be sad and stuck?”

“Maybe Hawaii.”

That wasn’t precisely true. She didn’t even like Hawaii. It was something to type while she thought about where she really would like to be. She amended her answer to “Perhaps Paris.” And then before he could respond, she typed, “I’ve heard Tahiti is lovely.”

“It sounds as if you would like to take vacation. I am hearing you are thinking of somewhere exotic.”

Yeah on the $166.32 in her bank account. Unlikely. An ad for a Hawaiian vacation flickered in her sidebar. She wrote, “Anything is more exotic than a copy shop on Pico Boulevard.”

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she typed, thinking: Had he really just said that? Was he quoting posters you saw at craft supply stores?

A poster at a craft supply store appeared in her sidebar.

The therapist continued: “What is it you hope to achieve in this session?”

She had gone to talk therapy back in the day and the lowest rung of the sliding scale had been $120/hour, and she hadn’t felt as if she were improving two dollar a minute’s worth. That had translated into a lot of pressure. Also, she had been aware of her family watching her closely. She could see the “is she better?” in their eyes. If she did something stupid, something any “normal” person (and let’s not get into the definition of normal right now) would do, she would be judged. Not as simply a glitch or a blip but as an: Is it starting again? Do we have to watch her?

“I was hoping…” she started typing, and the dots were in her head not on the screen. She looked at the words “I was hoping…” asking herself what was she hoping? “I was hoping I could figure out how to be happy again.”

“What does happiness look like?” When she didn’t write back in what seemed to be the allotted time of 17 seconds, he added, “Describe the word ‘happiness’ as if you were talking to a stranger.”

Oh, yeah. Because talking to strangers had worked out great for her. Talking to strangers is why she was here right now. But if she were going to make a go of this, she had to bring her best to the table. What did happiness look like? Undead cacti plants. A healthy relationship. Being able to shower. None of those felt appropriate. “I guess I used to feel as if I had something to look forward to.”

“Now, you do not have anything to look forward to?”

Coffee. Rainy mornings when she didn’t have to go anywhere. The way her clothes smelled when she took them out of the dryer, but that only worked if she could force herself to go down to the dank and dusty basement to do the laundry, and if she could force herself not to leave the wet clothes moldering for a day or two or until the super sent her a nasty text—otherwise she had to do the laundry all over again. And maybe that was the actual problem. Everything she did she had to do again. There was never any getting off the cycle, out of the program, off the wheel.

She wondered if it would be inappropriate to respond to any of his queries using an emoji. She scanned up their conversation and realized he seemed to be repeating words or phrases from her responses. Even though the welcoming email had advised her not to answer in one-word replies, she typed, “Nope.”

“There is only nope?”

“Yes,” she wrote. “There is only nope.”

For a moment, nothing happened. She wondered if she had broken the program. She could almost feel the machine brain whirr. Finally: “Please describe the last time you felt happy.”

She tried to remember. She’d gone out with her boyfriend Marcus for her birthday, and she had been excited about the evening. She’d dressed in crimson silk, stuck a gardenia in her hair, had met him at the cafe, and that had all been so smooth and so fine and he’d broken up with her after the coconut cream cake. Left her with the bill. Gone off to the girl he’d met at a photo shoot. The one he’d said was only a friend, and when she’d been concerned about the woman’s late-night texts that he never let her see he’d called her jealous.

The waiter had come by several times to see if she needed anything else, could he get her another drink? A refill of her water? When it was obvious he simply wanted her to leave so that he could seat someone else at the table. Also, her silent crying was disturbing the guests around her.

After that, things had snowballed a bit. She’d gotten careless at her job. Why? Because she couldn’t care less. She’d ended up taking a gig at a place in which she didn’t have to think and she didn’t have to worry and she went home at the end of the day somehow smelling like Xerox machines, and even that smell didn’t make her want to take a shower. Now all her clothes were eau de copy-shop and the aroma was even in her hair, and she remembered when she and Marcus used to take showers together and now the thought of taking one solo made her sob.

How did you type that into a small blinking box? How did you tell a robot that your life went off the rails because you had opened your heart too wide.

She wrote: “The last time I was happy was the day before my birthday.”

“Birthdays can be a let down for many people,” the therapist wrote. “There is the reminder of your mortality, and there is the feeling of not being where you would like to be in your life."

Yeah, it hadn’t been the birthday. It had been the bastard.

She said, “My birthday wasn’t the problem.”

That seemed to stymie him for a moment. Then: “Define the problem.”

He seemed to really like it when she gave him a sentence he could pluck from.

“I love people too much.” Was the robot going to ask her to define love or too much? And was that actually her problem? Maybe her problem was that she tried to be someone else when she was in relationships. Gardenias in her hair. Crimson when she would rather wear clothes that helped her blend with the night. Maybe the problem was putting herself into a box rather than destroying the box.

“Define the birthday.”

She stared at the screen. Maybe what she should actually do is what she wanted to do and not what was expected of her by other people. She had never really wanted to go to grad school had she? She’d used the break-up as a reason to drop out. And had she liked her “good” job? No, not really. She had simply had the job because it was the type of job she was supposed to have.

“Define wasn’t.”

She’d definitely broken the bot.

You know, maybe she hadn’t even been happy with Marcus. Maybe she’d been in a situation that had looked happy from the outside, so she’d decided that’s what happy was. But in reality, she had spent a lot of time keeping his cacti alive when she despised cacti. And she’d had to comb her hair and tuck her shirt in and really, what she wanted was something different, something else, and if she were to be totally honest with herself for once, maybe she’d been relieved.

Who would have thought it? This session had helped her. Not because of the machine, but because of herself.

She pressed Control X on the robot therapy session and deleted him. Then she took a breath, smelled copy shop everywhere, and went to the bathroom to finally take a shower.