I remember the doctor had a big face and a receding hair line. He looked like his name: Moorehead. I could see his features up close because he bent down to peer at me. I was nine years old and petite. He wore a dark suit and smelled like my dad. It had been three years since I’d seen my father, also a doctor, and it was the first time another doctor had paid so much attention to me. I wasn’t sure why I was there on my own, getting to talk without my sisters interrupting, but my plan was to use up all the oxygen.

There were two big leather chairs, a desk, books on all sides, fancy handwriting on paper in the frames on the walls. On his desk, there was a blotter and small white pads with blue writing on them. The place was dark with wooden blinds.

The doctor saw how excited I was and introduced himself. He asked me to focus and said, “Try to remember my name.”

As if I wouldn’t. He seemed smart. I wanted him to like me. I remember his name, even now.

There was no furniture my size in the room, just the leather wingback chair opposite him, where I pushed up on each arm of the chair and scooted my butt to the back. My feet couldn’t touch the ground. The edge of the seat came to my mid-calves. It was a grown-up’s room. It was not comfortable.

Dr. Moorehead was my first psychiatrist. My mother trusted shrinks. She left me alone with him and he began his work.

He showed me a series of cards and asked me what I saw in them. They had black blots. He told me I had free rein to say whatever came to mind. For me, that meant the more outrageous, the better. I told him what I thought and then changed my mind for fun, laughing. I answered him in my high voice and the slight lisp my braces gave me. I talked a mile a minute. That he was a doctor, like my dad, meant here was my chance to be impressive. Maybe he knew my dad, and dad would hear about how well I did.

“Can you tell me how the Earth was created?” he asked.

It was five years after the big bang theory had achieved the authority it has today, but the news hadn’t reached Miss Hand’s third-grade class.

I looked at his broad face for clues. None were evident. I began an elaborate tale which I hoped would entertain him.

“But where did the dinosaurs come from?” he asked. That beat me; I hazarded a guess— perhaps a giant egg had opened with them.

He didn’t react. So maybe it wasn’t a giant egg they came from? I began a new story. I was falling short of his expectations.

“Have you learned about atoms in school?” he interrupted.

No, I replied. I had lost his attention. He was no longer interested in my theories. Was it my voice? I could change that.

He asked me to draw the prehistoric world with crayons he gave me. I don’t know when he left the room. Now, I imagine he went to see my mother. I felt I could do a good job and went at my drawing with enthusiasm. Maybe he’d show my dad.

I remember the doctor’s name because he told me to. Not because of the surprising decision he made when he wrote the script, zipping it off the pad.

It said Mellaril. The green sugarcoated pills were small, like me. Years later, after the drug was withdrawn from the market, I found out it was a first-generation antipsychotic, meant to treat hallucinations and delusions. They thought I was schizophrenic.

Was I sick? Yes, heartsick, a cognitive therapist later told me. It was only when I went to Brazil as a teenager that I found out what I had: saudades, a deep longing for a person or thing that is absent. Like my dad.

Mickey Greaves sells software to Wall Street. She is a poet, writing a memoir. Her work appears in Cagibi, Poydras Review, Passengers Journal, Poets’ Choice, and Cross Cultural Poetics. She has read in downtown New York venues, St. Mark’s Church, Zinc Bar, and Poets & Writers. Follow her on Instagram @mickeygreaves, Twitter @xyzmickey and see more writing on www.mickeygreaves.xyz.