Sunlight filtered through venetian blinds, casting prison-bar shadows across Dan's mahogany desk. His fingers traced the wood's grain as memories flickered through his mind like an old film reel. Sharp knocks interrupted his reverie.

Miss Adelola appeared in the doorway, her deep purple pantsuit a splash of royalty against the office's muted tones. Her auburn hair was pulled into a severe bun, and oversized tortoiseshell glasses perpetually slid down her nose. Black-lacquered nails gripped a clipboard like a shield. Dan's lips twitched – he'd hired her six months ago, finding her precise methodology oddly comforting amid the chaos of human psychology.

“Your four o'clock, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Dan's smile faded as she closed the door. Patrick's sessions were becoming a double-edged sword – financially rewarding but emotionally draining. Each meeting felt like a surgical procedure where Patrick extracted pieces of Dan's certainty about the world, replacing them with shadows of doubt.

Patrick entered with his usual disheveled grace, collapsing onto the leather couch that had absorbed countless confessions. The afternoon light caught the silver threading through his dark hair – premature gray for someone barely thirty.

"Another conspiracy for your collection, Doc." Patrick's voice carried the weight of centuries. “Ever really thought about aging?”

Without waiting for a response, he plunged forward. "I hate aging, I hate time, I hate kids. Or wait, I don't hate kids – I pity them. Imagine being so despised by your parents that they sentence you to existence without consent." His fingers drummed an erratic rhythm on the armrest.

"I'm twenty-three but feel ancient. Time isn't a river; it's a meat grinder. I taught elementary school briefly, watched kids living in their bubble universes. They reminded me of myself, before..." He gestured vaguely at the air. “Before I saw the machinery behind it all.”

Patrick's eyes fixed on the pendulum clock, tracking its swing. "We're all just marking time until the end. Everything else is elaborate decoration, jewellery on a corpse." He laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “And the greatest joke? We're conditioned to celebrate aging, to welcome our slow dissolution into nothingness.”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “Have you ever looked at a child and seen your ghost, Doc? We're all just future memories, fading photographs in albums nobody opens.”

Dan realized he'd been holding his breath, his knuckles white against the armchair's leather. Patrick's words had a way of burrowing under his skin, making him question his own carefully constructed reality. Each session left him feeling more like the patient than the doctor.

"Any thoughts?" Patrick's question hung in the air like smoke.

Dan inhaled sharply, tasting the metallic edge of fear on his tongue. "Let's begin," he said, wondering who was really treating whom.