“How are we doing, Mr. Horseman?”

Bojack lifts his gaze onto his therapist, looking straight into her left eye. Then she turns her head, and looks at him with her right eye now. That’s so weird, and sure, he is kind of used to her glassy pigeon stare pointed at him that way, but that plus a really complicated question to think about isn’t a big help. She’s professional, and she’s kind and sometimes even comforting, but sometimes those eyes…

“Well, I don’t know how we are doing. I don’t know how you’re doing, I could tell you how I’m doing-”

“How are you doing?” She cuts him off somewhat patiently, knowing all about his time-borrowing tactics, switching to her left eye again.

Bojack sighs, looking into it again.

“I…” he hesitates, trying to think of something substantial to say. He could give her some cheerful bullshit, or act depressed and desponded, but he’s been in therapy for a whole of two years now - he should be feeling better. He should be saying ‘you know what, doc? I’m great, I’ve turned my whole life around, people trust me now and I’m living like a honest citizen, and do you see how sober I am?’ He can’t, though. Some days are a success if he just manages going to bed without relapsing, without beating himself up too much, without killing himself. If he gets a good night without taking five hours before falling asleep. The other days are sometimes worse. But it’s overall a little bit better than before. But nobody gave him a program, an idea of what to do. Diane is not an option anymore, she won’t be his conscience any longer, he had to kick his own awake.

“I don’t know.”

She gazes at him, before putting her pen down and her gaze softens a little.

“Well, that sounds better than feeling like shit, isn’t it?”

Bojack presses his lips together. Yeah. Wow.

It should be fine, though. Two years sober, he realized pretty soon LA was not his friend anymore. He thought that, as lucid as ever, as soon as he walked by the Around billboard. Walked by Sarah Lynn’s smile with its braces and white teeth. She was adorable. And it only took a little more than 12 minutes to wipe it away forever. LA did that.

No, you fucking asshole, a city can’t kill people. You did that. You did that and you let her die because you were too high and too much of a fuck up coward to do anything before it got too late. She died, and it was your fault.

“What do you think, these days?” She coos, leaning towards him, still with her big round eye pointed at him. He opens his mouth, thinks of repeating to her word by word what he just told himself, but he knows that’s not a good answer. He knows beating himself up is not good and is only a way to somehow feel good about himself, because he knows he fucked it all up and he got to a place where he can criticize himself.

But it’s still not good. It doesn’t feel particularly constructive, it’s only one more voice showing contempt for him.

“I don’t think of anything most of the time. I mean, I’m thinking mostly of the theatre and what to do next lesson, I’m thinking of groceries and movies. But I’m trying not to think of anything, actually.”

“What about your Hollywoob friends?” She asks, turning her head to switch her observing eye again.

Bojack can’t help letting a nervous smirk stretch across his mouth.

“They’re… fine, I guess. I don’t know. You know I haven’t heard from them in a while, and I know that’s better for them.”

It’s both unreal and incredibly hard, saying that aloud. Even Mr. Peanutbutter was a better company than no company at all, and Bojack got past the delusion that being alone is better a long time ago.

“How’s the theatre going? Are you satisfied with it?” She asks again, and this time Bojack finds himself cheering himself up without even realizing it, as he sits straight in his chair.

“You know what? It’s going well. We’re doing an adaptation of Carnage, and it’s… okay. Well, I probably should’ve chosen something less aggressive - you know, one kid ended up in the ER and there were three breakups, but other than that it’s good. They’re good kids. Not really good actors, but… good people. Kinda a dying breed in Hollywoob”

Dr. Dulldove nods, with her eye never leaving him one moment, and finally smiles.

“So you’re investing your energies on your present. That’s pretty good, keep doing that.”

Bojack can’t share the enthusiasm. Of course I’m trying to not think of the past. What good’s that going to do?

“That’s nothing to be proud of. It just means I’m barely hanging on, it’s not an achievement. Sometimes I think I shoudn’t have come clean. At least I would still have all of my friends, my job, my life.”

“Are you sure it would’ve been better?”

Bojack sighs, even though there’s no impatience in her voice.

“No. Shit, of course not. But it sucks anyway. I have nobody to lean on, I’m living in the boonies with nobody giving a shit about me while... just a couple of years ago I was in LA and I had friends. I had a life. It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was a life I could… you know, deal with. What do I have now? Nobody, and I don’t even have a career to spend my time on! Even Hollyhock realized she’s better off without me.”

And that really sucks to think about, now. If someone who fits in the YA target demographic figured out she can’t afford to look up to him as a brother, who the fuck is he? What’s he good for?

Dr. Dulldove takes a swig of water, before leaning on the table, with a pretty serious expression on her face.

“Mr. Horseman. You fucked up. But you also paid for it - abundantly so. And you know that doesn’t mean everything should go back to the way it was, it means you need to start over from a better place. Build a new set of healthy habits to replace the ones you had and make space for a new outlook on things.”

Bojack snorts, crossing his arms.

“I know that. Easier said than done though, right? And I mean, if I haven’t done that within two years, is it even possible at this point? I’m like fifty, I’m not the kind of guy to just take fifty years of life and turn them upside down. I could’ve done that when I was twenty, but…”

“Two years are nothing, though. For change to happen you’ll need a lot more time. You’re just at the beginning of actual recovery, Mr. Horseman. You’re not like a computer you could fix in a few months, it takes time.”

Yeah, she’s right.

“So when will I be okay?” Bojack says, his voice raising a little bit as he gestures in the air. “I spent my entire adult life feeling like shit, and trying to be better only made me feel worse, everyone I got close to ended up rejecting me, so after fifty years of this shit happening over and over again, how do I know things will be better this time around?”

Dr. Dulldove looks at him silently for a bit, and then shrugs.

“You don’t know, and I don’t know. But trying is better than the alternative. And as for people, the best part is there’s a lot of them, and when you fuck up one relationship you can always try building another.”

“I have only one sister, though.”

Dr. Dulldove switches her point of view. From one eye to the other.

“That’s true,” she replies without hesitating. Bojack crosses his arms again, leaning back.

“And she’s never going to talk to me again.”

“I don’t know that that’s true.”

“You think?”

“She might come around eventually, especially once she sees your changes.”

Bojack finds himself clenching his teeth. That’s hope, and that has never been good for him in the long run.

“And what if she doesn’t?”

“You will cope with that too. There is no alternative to that. In the end, there is only one thing you can do and that’s moving on, because you can’t stop.”

“I sure as hell can try-”

“That’s not an option if you want to live. And you abundantly showed that you do want to live. So there are no alternatives for that.”

Bojack sighs again. Two years of therapy, and it seems he’s still stuck more or less where he used to be.

“So… what? I just keep running my theatre and get used to this life?”

“Well, is it that much of a bad life?” She asks him, tilting her head.

Every day he’ll wake up and go to community college, teaching some dumb kids how to act - and they’re kind of okay. He’ll cook his own food, pays his taxes, gets a dignified amount of royalties from anything he did that isn’t Horsin’ Around. He’ll stay away from political discussions, maybe sometimes he’ll go watch a movie and chat with someone. And with time, he’s learning how to be okay with it, after all. He didn’t hurt anyone in two years, he’s been sober for two years.

“... No, I guess not. All I have to do is keep it up, then.”

She nods.

“I know it’s hard, but it’ll get easier.”

She’s all platitudes and basic self-love talk, but so far she’s only been making sense. He’s heard these things before, and before they were words entering one way and flowing out carelessly the other.

Today it’s different. These days, it’s different. With no alcol or drugs or a career or friends, how could he not take these concepts seriously?

“I just hate that it didn’t work out. You know, there were a lot of good things in my life in LA. I had really good friends. I was on the right path at some point, before it all came down.”

She nods, clicking the top of her pen.

“Well, think of it this way - you just bulldozed through the old things, and brought it all back to ground zero. Sometimes good things have to be wiped away so that better things can come, it doesn’t have to mean it’s all over.”

Bojack hums, ruminating that in his mind.

And then Dr. Dulldove smiles, taking out her notepad.

“So, no change in your meds, I’d say. Keep taking them, steady.”

“Uhhh. Sure.”

She looks at him, then at her list of appointments.

“And I’ll see you on the 22 next month, same time.”

Bojack nods, without really bothering to check whether he’ll be busy. He surely won’t be. He’s got nothing to make him busy nowadays, anyway.

“Good! Well, I’ve got to go now. I saw you doing pretty good today, so keep it up.”

“Yeah… cool.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Horseman,” she says, spreading her wings.

He looks on, as she opens her window’s studio and flies off. Bojack just sits there a few minutes more, before drawing out a long sigh and standing up, a bit baffled that she just trusted him with not raiding the office. Then he figures, what’s there to get in here anyway? Nothing he could give a shit for. And then… of course… he’s not that kind of person, no. Right.

Well, that conversation didn’t give him anything he didn’t already know. But it did the trick, somehow. Just talking it out with someone almost lifted the weigh a bit. That’s the common sensation he’s been getting since he finally convinced himself to take therapy seriously, not as a way to escape responsibility or feel better about his shit, but as a method. And sure, the previous therapy royally fucked him over, but even if Dr. Dulldove was to expose everything he told her… that would still be pretty okay. After all, he already dropped all the bombs, and probably nobody would care anyway. People must be too busy canceling someone else, these days, to give a shit about an old has-been. Not that they gave a shit before, either.

He gets out, looking over to the quaint, boring, plain road where traffic flows quietly and people passing by stop to eye him up, before going back to their business. A few miles out, he can spot the endless fields stretching until sight would allow you, and it feels so weird - he used to live in one of the most chaotic, nonsensical, violent cities in the US. Violent in every way. This is… equally violent, but on a smaller scale. It almost seems this might be what LA must’ve felt like a couple of centuries back, and he wonders - how many lives like his own could’ve benefited from this?

None of his friends hit him up recently, the last one must’ve been Diane, and Todd, and he thinks Mr. Peanutbutter must’ve sent him some voicemail, he doesn’t know, he didn’t check it out. But they must all be doing ok, that’s really all he should know. Even Hollyhock. She sure is doing fine, there is definitely no need to worry about her. She’s got eight caring dads, after all - she won’t be a fuckup the way he turned out to be.

He sets off to go home, albeit still not entirely convinced that’s where his life is supposed to be. He still kind of senses the lack of the one he had miles and miles away, like what he imagines the sensation of a phantom limb must feel like.

Maybe he should go back. Just for a weekend, just to walk the streets of LA the way one greets an old friend. But he was never very graceful to old friends. Maybe if he does make a new life here, there will be no need to miss the good parts in the other.

God, he might start actually hoping he makes it.