Look Up

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Apparently Catherine

We don’t spend enough time looking up anymore, somewhere along the line I forgot how much joy could come from just lying on the grass looking up at the clouds.

When I was little a friend and I were always looking up, at the clouds, the ceiling or the stars. It didn’t matter the vista we would lie in our backs let our insecurities fall away with the earth and talk for hours upon hours about nothing and everything.

I saw that friend again last week, we rarely catch up now but when we do we always seem to find our way back to the past, and as we lay on our backs once more, this time on a lush eucalypt lawn we looked up at the trees and remembered simpler times.

I’d had a therapy session just before our catch up, it was a hard one and excruciatingly unhelpful because the office vibe was off, I kept dissociating in and out and frankly felt stuck between worlds and as though I had forgotten how to speak.

Words bombarded my mind, flung at me with intent from others, seemingly everyone, they all apparently wanted me to speak out about things and I could hear their pleadings and feel their desperation but couldn’t manage to open my mouth about anything important. The clock ticked on and suddenly time was up, another session wasted.

That afternoon, lying on the grass watching the blue sky I whispered to my friend “hey do you remember *Layla?” My friend replied “yes…” I could feel the wariness in her tone. The voices in my head silenced for a moment and I said “Thank you for coming to the school when you did, I think you may have saved my life”. My friend looked at me, smiled sadly and nodded. I felt so seen in that moment.

While I couldn’t begin to get the words out in therapy to describe this ghost from our childhood that is still haunting me, I grabbed that moment of soul warming validation from my friend, just her remembering too, silently acknowledging how hard it had been…
For someone who gets lost in what was real and what was not, knowing someone else had seen it too was worth 10 therapy sessions.