The 3lack 3ox.

 I have another blog here [+]

I thought perhaps I should turn it into a book?

Here is how it begins.

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This story starts and ends at a place few of us visit, or return from unscathed. 

Come with me!

I invite you to imagine a beach, it is a grey and cold day. The sand is hazy and it shifts uneasily. Suddenly I realize that I’m walking closer to the waves than I want to be. Sand is difficult to navigate. Its surface reconfigures rapidly under the force of wind, wave and time.

Nothing here is solid. 

A labyrinth of dunes to our right brings sharp memories, like marram grass, brittle needles. There is no boundary fence to be seen, no indication of how far this zone of dunes extends, or if we will have energy enough to ever climb out. We wont go there, or at least not today. 

A sense of exhaustion. 

To our left, the sea is a lethal movement, a fight between the august gravities of moon and sun. It pulls me towards my drowning, towards darkness and oblivion. Towards the rip tide that will pull me so far out and away.

High above us the cloud wraps the sun in a damp, grey blanket. There is no sense of transcendence, no wide blue yonder or golden sunshine, ice cream and and laughter.

Looking down, close enough to the sea, notice how the sand becomes a mirror. We are in the space between sanity and psychosis, between suicide and recovery, asking hard questions about how mental health is imagined and monetized.

The scene changes…

You stand behind me. 

You are invisible. 

You are in the future. 

Now. We are in a room in an old house, the light here is dull, the wallpaper is a subdued gold. I sit on a sofa, my bag beside me. A flash drive that is actually a sound recorder is hidden within. I decided to record all my therapy sessions when I realized that there must be a black box.

He sits opposite in an arm chair. When he gets up, I see how the chair contains the impression of his body. I’m reading to him from my phone, words I hope will be a magic spell.

I need to impress him, but more than that, I want him to know who he is losing. I’m trying to tell him that if he gets this wrong, he will kill me.

I'm warning you. This will be a love story. Just in case you are like me, too old for dreams of happy endings. I’m not cynical, call it experience. We fly lethal miles above the inevitable, and though love expands time, weaving threads of gold through dull memory, scattering the ashen ground we tread with jewels. Those diamond stars that twinkle so alluringly soon get into our shoes and make our toes bleed. 

Rest assured though, this plane is going to crash.

So ran my thoughts as I shuffled between seats, towards the one with my ticket number. Sitting down I let my mind accept the view from the tiny window; the wing, the engines. 

And then we are above the clouds, and they are impossible too.  I hold the letter still unopened, and the key...

I was writing for my therapist, a man I will refer to from here onwards as Mr Kit Marlowe. I had fallen in love with Kit just a few months after realizing that he wasn’t the therapist for me. And I believed there was a possibility that he had fallen for me too, I hoped that that was so. 

But falling in love with a therapist is as forbidden as falling in love with a Catholic priest. 

Or so it appeared to me at the time.

So I hid the fact. 

From him...

For a year. 

After a year I felt strong enough to deal with his answer. 

When I told him how I felt his response was far worse that anything I’d foreseen. I didn’t hear the ring of truth, I heard naïve moralizing. I tried again a few weeks later to get into an honest dialogue about emotions. He blushed and pretended that he hadn’t understood what I meant by open honesty. 

It was as if the therapy room was so disconnected from solid facts and grounded truths that we may as well have been on a plane, flying on empty with nothing but intellectual debate to support us! 

But I cannot cope with this level of unreality. And I wanted him to realize that after the crash, there is no coming back. 

No one will benefit, and no one will survive unscathed.

The scene changes, I don't want to see, I don't want to remember...

A field. The smell of kerosene. This place is impossible to describe, I can only categorize, it is the site of a plane crash. What once flew as an arrow straight and true through the bright air, high above the clouds, is static. Dismembered. Shredded by the fall. Plastic flaps in the wind. The earth is torn. Grass burns.  The ground is strewn with seats, with people, no I dare not let my mind register what is here. 

I shut down my senses one by one. 

No one survives this kind of disaster. 

Under a heap of smouldering metal, the black box preserves the last moments, and the story of what happened here..

The sea and sand shift uneasily like iron filings being pulled by a magnet. I evoke the last memory. I am alone, noticing how the stone steps that lead up to his house, to his room, to the sofa and golden wallpaper. The steps have melted almost, as if sagging under the weight of so many years of footsteps. I try to turn my mind towards the third place, neither inward or outward; slicing time into smaller and smaller parts, moments to instances. I need to calm the waves, steady the froth of hope and fear. I sense the rip-tide I feel it take me, it is already carrying me out and away.

I stood up and left his room, closing the two doors, walking backwards through the narrow passageway. Turning my face towards the sun. Wishing its fire would burn the arrow from my heart. Cauterize the wound. But instead of flame there is another radiance, invisible and destroying. 

Stone turns to glass and the sun is blue, the world translucent, lit by a frenzied Cherenkov light. I pass beyond sound within a detonation beyond hearing. The sun is exhaling a radiation, toxic and invisible, shredding the code of my existence. Far off, my car is just a smudge of red on a grey ribbon, infinitely far away. Again I disconnect and enter the slipstream, the third place between time. I place myself entirely in the present and promise to return.

If I survive I must return, to find and open up the black box.