Excerpt
from The Compass
by Tammy Kling & John Spencer Ellis
Escape
"This path we were forced to take as best we might, in single file, and there I was -- the flames to the left of me, and the abyss to the right."--Dante Alighieri
There are moments in your life that change the course of your destiny forever.
Some people like me, have already had them. Others have not, but that moment is ahead, like a shark that prowls the ocean floor.
We are merely helpless swimmers on the surface above, thinking we're in control and seeing only the shore in the distance. For most people, it's worth swimming toward, worth fighting for. The shore provides hope, the horizon above it an entrance into a new world. We swim, achieve, work hard, and all the while keep moving toward the future.
Yet what lies beneath is everything because it has the power to change your world, envelop you in darkness, and alter everything you thought you believed.
After the accident, I remember thinking of a different analogy -- of the mind as a battlefield. It was three days into detention as I called it, a place my family had checked me into to save me from myself. It was an intake facility in Tucson, where the counselors treated me with drugs for depression and daily doses of therapy. The tables were littered with books that boasted intentionally uplifting titles.
They tried to heal the wound on my jaw, but it refused to cooperate.
It was different from the therapist they had sent me to in California. There were different ways of pulling things out of you. I had been driven to Tucson by my brother, and I remained for a few days, talked it out, and then escaped a month before he was due to pick me up again. I rode a Greyhound back home and went in to work the next day as if nothing had happened.
On the bus ride I discovered a newspaper in the seat, a headline about a woman who had opened the door of an airplane in mid-flight and jumped. They found her body in a field of flowers with a note still tucked in her suit pocket.
It is on this day, she had written, that I have lost all hope.
I tore the article out and kept her picture in my pocket for months. Blonde, red cherub cheeks, a smile of sunshine and daisies, like the field they had found her in. The face of hope.
On the day I left suburbia for the desert, I had no illusions that I'd ever return. On that day, all hope was lost. I'd exhausted all of my options. Worked without working. Slept without sleeping. Talked without remembering what I'd said or to whom I'd said it.
"So what's next on your journey?" Marilyn asked. She pulled a music device that looked like an iPod from her pocket and untangled the cord.
The morning sun rose over the mountains behind her.
I lifted my arms toward the sky, stretching them wide. I gauged my feelings, as I had become accustomed to doing. In grief therapy, the psychotherapist who tried to crack open my skull and pour sunshine in had outlined the stages of mourning, and they were fixed there forever. One tool was to get your body moving, even if it was something small, like stretching. In the mornings I thought through all of those grief stages without even trying to.
Sadness, anger, despair, forgiveness.
I was stuck in the first three without any hope of achieving the last one. Each morning it was despair, pure and black. The Darkness that defined my life now was etched into my soul.
It's almost as if his life has been divided into two sections: before the accident and after.
"Did I sleep?" I asked. I didn't attempt a smile.
She nodded that indeed I had, and it was for the first time in months that I had done so without meds.
"You snored a little," she said. "It was a deep REM sleep." She put the earbuds into her ears and turned on the device.
The world was silent, but music emanated from where she was sitting.
The above is an excerpt from the book The Compass by Tammy Kling and John Spencer Ellis. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
Copyright © 2009 Tammy Kling and John
Spencer Ellis, authors of The Compass