Her Safe Space; 2 (with author commentary)

Okay, she thinks, this is just weird.

Then she hears the heartbeat, soft and true. It fills her with a sense of safety. She feels coddled, nurtured, protected. She gasps as the air in the room thickens to warm fluid and the orange glow envelops her.

The glow is love, she muses, why didn’t I see that before?

Now the heartbeat can be heard as though it beats underwater. Sarah thinks that with each throb, she might even feel the percussion in her chest, but she can’t be sure. Katherine has felt the baby kick and the experience is latent at best.

Sarah rolls to her left, her arms and hands tucked neatly against her, and brings her knees to her tummy. The pounding of the heartbeat, so steady, so sustaining, something in whose presence she might be okay with death, throbs on as though it beats only for her.

And maybe it does. Sarah is in a womb.

The revelation startles her, but before she can sit up, she feels herself being rocked and the sound of her mother singing to her.

Sarah closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she is no longer in a womb. She is no longer being coddled and protected and swaddled in utero. Naked as she was before, she feels the cold floor beneath her and the glow is replaced by a chill that runs up her back.

There is no love here, she thinks, the Universe is principally of a consuming nature, is it not?

Coming to life, Existence, before her is the corridor, birthing door after door.

Now beneath her is a blood red carpet, and a strange warmth and familiarity.

Family, she thinks, I knew I recognized this feeling from somewhere.

She hears screaming.

The first door to which she feels connected is the first door on her right. Written across the top of it is the password for her laptop computer. She knows this door well. It is one which she has never opened. Behind it she hears a pregnant woman screaming and cursing.

She is giving birth to ideas.

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I had fun writing this section. It was actually structured last night, right as I was about to fall aslep. I pulled up the document in my phone, wrote down a few things that I saw and went to bed. I wrote it this afternoon.

The parallelism between installments 1 and 2 would indicate that I am stricken with...sadness, I would say...regarding my decision not to have anymore children. I think in a sense, I've been using Sarah to help me get in touch with that part of myself, just like I use the horses in my meditation room. 

Again, I do not believe that my horses technically exist, but when I first added those horses to my meditation room, they showed me exactly what I needed to see at the time, simply because I asked them to. It is for this reason that I use them to get in touch with the most deeply rooted conflicts in my life present day. They are a portal that I built to my subconscious. It still works. Why build another portal?

Often, during healing ceremonies, the Rite performer's movements and mannerisms create a swell of energy within the patient, setting the mood, so to speak, and this energy is as important, if not more important, than the ritual itself. Healing ceremonies are largely built on metaphysical properties that cause physical reactions within the body, so by virtue of the Rite performer making it look like he's doing something mystical and magical, he likely is in fact affording the patient the amount of energy needed to heal themselves.

When I started this story, I knew that it would be a journey into my heart, but I didn't know what I would find. I never do. All I know is that my meditation room is a portal in and of itself. So is every door I've described, from the giant door at the beginning of the story to the doors in the endless corridor. 

The complexity of my meditation room is based on how much detail I put into it, and it's easier for me to see something if it's in writing. In lay, my meditation room has healing properties and I wanted an easier way to get in touch with it. Hell, when I built my tree house I felt the weight of the hammer in my hands. I could feel the rubber on the grip. I could feel every blow striking the nails. 

This story is also a tribute to my meditation room because I sealed mine off when I moved home, right as things were about to get really shitty (as if). This story marks the reintroduction of my meditation room into my daily life.

Wherever this story is going, it's not quite there yet, so I'll keep at it.

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