Today's #flashfiction #MindAltering

“It's driving me absolutely batty!”

Van Helsing* #quote

CJ is coming over today so much fun will be had. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Mind-Altering

         In order to do my job I have to mind-alter more than the average person. Much more. It gets expensive but I feel proud I do the work I do. After all, I help the poor souls that cannot mind-alter themselves.

       I made the decision to take up my job after I asked my parents something when I was very young.

      “Gregory,” my mother said to me, “The reason the boy keeps crying about his dead dog is because he can't mind-alter himself to forget about it like you or me. He can't erase or diminish sad thoughts or make up fun fantasy memories and simulations like us. He didn't have the chip implanted in his brain to do it when he was a baby.”

       I chose to never get rid of that memory of the boy mourning his dog. And nobody can force another to mind-alter with the chip. A dictator tried that but it is something the brain and chip does together.   So mind-alteration is a wonderful thing. A person can chose to erase sadness or create the most wonderful of memories. Except for some. And I help those people as a therapist. I pay for a lot of mind-altering myself to deal with hearing all their sad memories. Dealing with sadness is not something people deal with in our society. Or I simulate the memories they have to go through what they went through to better empathize with them.

      Therapists for those who cannot mind-alter is an occupation because those who can mind-alter do not want to normally speak with people who carry around sad memories. They feel like sad memories that aren't kept on purpose must be rotten and plague-like. It is law that chip-less people see at least one therapist.

I remember someone saying, “I cleaned up my brain, why should I let them dirty it up?”

      Over the years of doing therapy my methods changed. I used to mind-alter a great deal. Wiping things I heard away because I didn't want to remember the sadness they told me about. Eventually though I started experimenting with emotions. I started to keep them over time. And my own emotions as well. I began to wipe my mind only to keep the confidentiality of my patient's stories if they chose it.

I started to feel emotions over time like those people. It was hard. A trial harder than anything else I did. It felt good to keep all emotions over time though. To be unfiltered. Like my patients.

       The law made the chip-less people see someone like me as a therapist to reveal their emotions to. I found someone to reveal my emotions to when I decided to embrace them, someone better than a therapist, a wife. We met in a bar when she noticed I looked sad, “A rare gift in this world of mind-alteration.” She had a chip and made the same choice as I did to embrace all emotion instead of locking what we didn't like away.

      Our marriage was a long, beautiful, and emotional one, full with all the memories life gave us.