Chapter 6: Treehouse Therapy

"Start with why you broke curfew," Dr. Corgan stated quietly.

My therapist was about a foot shorter than me, and dressed in five shades of brown. She had that tight honey-colored bun of hair, the type for people obsessive about their appearance yet incapable of hiding the same meticulous personality behind the clipped and calm words during my one hour session.  

"I wanted to climb through the false roof and be alone," I whispered, eyes staring at a rug colored and designed to quiet worries. Even then, the rug began to blur as my skinny, seventh grade frame, hair rumpled and appearing windblown, crawled with infinite care along the cinder block walls holding up the foam ceiling on all sides like a sea of white and gray. "Truthfully, I wanted to run away, but I would have left behind my brother and sister, and my dorm-dad would have beat me to within a half-inch of my life. Either way, I couldn't figure out which one was worse, and headed towards the exit of the roof a few meters away. I knew that if I could get outside, the tree-house would only be a short sprint away and I would be alone."

"Yet you could have been expelled?"

"An acceptable loss at the time," I countered, wondering why the image was fading on the rug, and sensing as if for the first time my therapist's perfume slowly crawling towards me from the short span between us. "You can't understand. I needed that tree-house badly; I was escaping from the death cage I had made earlier that day with Jeremy, from the guilt."

"Why the tree-house? Why not a call to your parents? Or visit to your sister?"

"Are you fucking kidding me?!" My mirthless laugh and obscenity surprising me even as I spoke it. "The curfew is total. No phone calls, no visits, definitely no climbing. Which is exactly why I did it."

"What guilt were you running from?"

"I ran from the war cage. The aquarium sitting in my room as a silent glass sentinel, the poisoned wolf spiders an eerie contrast to the tangerine orange millipedes embalmed in the other corner. I ran to my tree, a coiled and thick pine tree at the corner of our dorm's soccer pitch. There was only one way up this tree, a secret route between branches and up a steep portion of the trunk to reach the main tree-house sitting area. Once there you could throw down a rope ladder, but that wasn't my intention that night. I went to rel-live the deaths of millipedes and spiders, the ones I had pitted against each other in an aquarium that now only held two insects, each plotting the other's death. Ascending the tree was slight work compared to crawling on bloody knees and scraped palms along cinder blocks, and once I got there, my feet dangled out over space where light was shadow-play between branches and street."

"And you say that night your dreams followed you to the tree?"

"Yes. Like last night when I remembered stories from my boarding school, whispers from a dozen years back that brushed against my body. Like this one.

Among these cluttered dreams, one would call my night
a seer, a prophet...
sifting between a dozen muttering dreamscapes
I discover an anomaly, a nightmare - at the edge of my brain's world.

approaching this vagabond I feel my skin glowing,
warming in a vicious way,
and I notice my anomalous nightshadow
turn its hooded head (could you call it that?)
shuddering slightly, preparing my cold lips
caked in day-balm talking
I usher out a short cold puff of chilled air-
a question
"where are you leading me?"

trembling I looked down to see my tattoos dancing around my skin
re-aligning themselves in mixed swirls of ink
now a country's outline
then a crow's outstretched, clipped wings
and snap my gaze towards this nightmare, who silently crouches,
pointing.

Slowly, hobbled to an unflinching midnight
I see daydawn begin to bleed across my dreams
awakening me...
Sadly, I turn my body towards my companion,
my back upon daylight, and
recede into eternal shadow.

PART II

Eternity within the unkind space of a moment
harbors me, and watched me walk, exhausted
towards this nightmarish gloom.
lidless eyes carefully stare my way, blinkless
veinless
assessing my vulnerability.

I wrinkle my brows together in worry,
and reach out for my guide's hand
shunting aside embarrassment.
His fingers, bones of anxiety and fear
curl around my thumb,
and with a hiss pull me further, faster
than I thought possible
where gray slants into slate into granite
and sexy sunshine is stamped out
an endangered luxury... 

...with pings in the mud
with creaks as breaking ice under a heavy burden
soft sunlight creeps into this dark corridor
as my terrible guide flees!
in his own scream,
scrambling against sharp sides of this dreamscape.

There, shyly smiling is hope
stretching out horizon-long fingers of blue and vermillion
reaching into my mouth, pulling my tongue, body following
flying forward into a room squeezed from
Nile blue skies
chameleon green scales
and ruby-throated afternoon." 

 "You tell that as if you were truly there," Dr. Corgan commented. "You have a way with words that took me into your brain's world, a confusing place, a distorted place. What were you running from? What did that tree hold which gave you answers?"

"I was lost in boarding school. I was suffocating in its rules like the baby chickens we fed live to our pet boa Alex. I had begun falling into depression as wide and dark as the barrels we filled with cockroaches and exploded with illegal cherry bombs. Don't you see that I sough death in the crook of those branches? I went to learn why I hadn't seen the spider's lightning attack, why millipede poison infected in seconds, paralyzing the wolf spider's body twitching in its last throes, and why I hadn't fallen off the cliff on a previous day's hike when the wind slapped me in the back while staring over the edge. Why?"

She sighed, taking off her blue-rimmed glasses in a gesture I was becoming familiar with when our sessions never produced answers. Rubbing her eyes, I saw the late afternoon's city lights dance across her face, making her suddenly older than I had ever seen. 

"I just thought my flushed face

would fade away.

Like an amber night, Fall ochre

minute death," I mumbled to myself, waiting on her to collect her thoughts.

"What was that?" 

"Nothing, just a line a I made up," I responded. "We're out of time aren't we?" I asked, pretending not to have seen her casting a quick glance to the small clock on her left.

"I'm afraid so, but I want you to think this week about places or people you might have run away from. I want you..."

"Good afternoon then." I was already walking out, watching false ceilings swirl back into view, and sinking into a memory full of smoke and sulfur.