I rush forward, into it, slamming my forearms into the banner, but it’s not working, it’s notworking,the column is wood and the varnish is bubbling and the surface is blackening and smoke is everywhere everywhere everywhere and I can hear my name
Gwenna.
Gwenna.
“Gwenna!”
I freeze.
I am not in danger. I am not in a church. I am not I am not I am not.
Not now, anyway.
I swallow, breathing hard and warm under the collar of my sweatshirt, the plastic paddles in my hands still pulsing gently: left, right, left, right.
“Let’s stop.” Across from me, Jessie the therapist recrosses her legs, her tone gentle but firm. “Take a deep breath, okay?”
I nod. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
“Maybe take a few more.”
I do as I’m told. Jessie watches.
“Can you go back somewhere safe?” she asks.
Again, I nod. I close my eyes like the good little crazy girl that I am and find it.
The safe space.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. EMDR. The gold standard of evidence-based trauma therapy. Practiced extensively and—so they assured my mother in the brochures, anyway—successfully at the Renfrew Center. You go back to the bad moment, whatever it was, relive it right there in the theater of your mind, while darting your eyes back and forth—or, in my case, holding a pair of pulsing paddles, the psych-ward version of the buzzing pagers they give you at a Cheesecake Factory—and something about the mystical combination of bilateral physical stimulation and plunging headlong into the darkest and most torturous moment of your past just…rewires your brain.
They’re not really sure how it works, Jessie the therapist had admitted to me in one of our first sessions.But it does work.
I was in no state to object, or to insist on further proof. I’m still not. I am in no state to have any strong opinions or convictions about anything.I am putty in your hands, madame.
And part of EMDR is a retreat. Putting yourself back in order, settling yourself into a mental space of safety by picturing a physical one.
I, of course, chose the sickest safe space I could think of.
The one that’s gone.
That doesn’t even exist.
That brought me here.
The B-level at the Caliburn Library.
My alcove.
My books.
Mine.
But Jessie the therapist doesn’t have to know that. No one has to know that. In my mind, the B-level is eternal, an undying Elysium I can visit whenever I want.
“Gwenna?”
Jessie’s voice startles me back to reality.Here, I want to say.Present.
