The Staircase Part 1: Everything, Everything

 That next week after my "visit to the Captain's house" I hadn't noticed any amazing changes in my interior or exterior world.  


I had not found the dark room of my pain, opened the windows, tore the roof open and let the negative memories fly away. 


I was still me,  feeling something strong and wordless but so acute it was driving me to misery. 

At the start of our next session, my therapist laughed when I dashed right into the big hypnosis chair and reclined.  Maybe she was going to ask something, process something, ask me things you ask anorexics (did you eat? did you exercise too much? did you pass out?) but I wasn't open to that. I wanted to go back again and look for another clue. And my body language said Please.

Again she relaxed me. 

I found myself open and perfectly still, a peace I had never known in 20-something years stuck in my chatter filled head. 

Just finding that place, just knowing it exists would have been enough.  Finding mental peace was like finding out I've had a backyard with a pool and was to busy with tedium to notice.

Again she said to find myself in a hallway.

There goes my voice again saying its a trick, its all Jungian symbolism.

This time, again, I wasn't in a hallway. I was outside. 

I told my therapist that, laughing at my instinctive and unapologetic disobedience.   She laughed too then asked me to describe where I was.

I'm outside on a rolling soft hill. Behind me was a house, our house, isn't it beautiful? it's almost finished. 

It was stone and dark wood with an  iron railing on the left balcony. 

The weather is cool and wet.  

The road goes up between those trees, and I'm waiting for him to return by dusk. Which he does, he always. I used to worry but he returns every time, nothing bad ever happens.

While we wait for him to return my therapist asks me if I can write.

I laugh. I sound and feel like me, except for what I have to say. 

I tell her that I don't know if I can write. I've never tried. 

Anyway, What would I need to write for? Who would I write to? And tell them what? My whole world is here.

Before those words can really sink in, I feel him turning the corner from the woods, pulled by horses.

What is that behind him?  I was drawn to it magnetically.  The most magical wonderful double helix twisting iron I'd ever seen. 

He had to explain it was stairs because I couldn't wrap my mind around it being anything but art.  I had never imagined anything so complex, so beautiful, so intricate. 

He set it up, and we loved it. It was our favorite thing. We had bowls and dishes and linens and youth and time and each other. 

 The story unfolded beautifully, perfectly, actually. 

We had everything, just everything.

I felt like I was watching a wonderful movie where nice happy people were enjoying a life of simple delights.   I wanted to stay there as long as I could and  somehow soak up a piece of that fleeting piece of wonderful.  

The first part of the story, at least.  

But everything is always changing. Everything. 

And what came next, what I saw and what I felt, changed me.