Stuck 

The light of the head torch illuminated the Mica in the quartz rock bed that her face rested against. A thousand tiny speckles like an interstellar map. Her eyes darted between fixed points, like she was searching for some hidden web connecting each tiny glistening fragment but there was none. Each fleck stood in perfect isolation, part of a much bigger and bigger and bigger whole. After some time her gaze softened and released and she began to take in her entire field of view, limited and yet expansive like looking through a telescope at one small section of infinite space. 

The head torch flickered again and so did her heartbeat. A flash of momentary thumping abnormality, like a tremor. It was panic. She saw the thought in almost simultaneous synchronicity as experiencing the emotion.

She thought about the bowl metaphor that she’d spent years practicing, She calmly focussed on the words, reciting them like they were lines from a role she had been fully immersed in. 

 
Imagine your mind as a bowl filled with water.
Your emotions, thoughts, and sensations are like things placed into the bowl. Sometimes calm and clear, sometimes turbulent and cloudy.

If the water is stirred (anger, fear, craving), it becomes hard to see clearly; with stillness and non-reactivity, the contents settle and clarity returns.

You are not the contents of the bowl, you are the awareness that sees them.

Were they lines from a character she was playing, pretending to be, or had she become the character.

The panic began to fade..

“It’s the oscillation” she was telling her therapist now in that slightly cold dark townhouse in which she had spent so many 50 minute windows of introspection. “I just feel like I get these moments, real, like I’m talking real peace. Like peace I never thought would be possible in my twenties and then FLASH, something happens and It's doom, I’m in hell, actual torment. Existence is misery and death is final”.

Her therapist looked at her with a combination of genuine unmoderated empathy and also vague frustration. This was not a new reflection. This was just another time around the “nonlinear healing” cycle. 

“Sisyphus” she said. “You’re always talking about Sisyphus right. You’ve told me that you are Sisyphus, that you are the boulder, that you’re the mountain. You’ve told me that you understand that you are all parts of the situation because you create the situation.” She went to reach for her little plastic white board that she always pulled out for elaborative visual explanations but stopped for a microsecond then redirected to pick up her glass of water. “What I’m about to say may feel harsh but I think I need to start being blunt if we’re going to get you out of this pattern.” As she took a moment to sip her water between sentences both women’s eyes landed on the small spider that was emerging from its cozy web between the window and the fly screen. Their eyes met again. “You will never find safety through understanding”

She could feel a gentle dripping somewhere on the lower half of her body. Maybe her left leg? It was uniform and comfortably paced. “Is this more like a EFT or chinese water torture” she thought. She recalled something in that somatic therapy book her friend was always going on about that tapping is believed to help regulate the nervous system by recoding the way the brain associates the trigger with distress. The dripping felt incredible and excruciating at once. The knowledge that she couldn’t avoid or escape it intensified the sensation in huge waves of pain and pleasure. It's funny how in the dark all your thoughts get louder.

The headtorch flickered again and suddenly everything was pragmatic. For a split second all emotion was gone and she was a veteran fire fighter, acting in perfect functional process in the face of extreme crisis. Some chaotic medley of animalistic survival instinct, dissociation and long honed experience. She tried to calculate the time left on the torch. Was it even the battery depleting or had it sustained damage against the hard unforgiving surface of the rocks. She thought about the likelihood of someone finding her before the torch went out, before her cramped body succumbed to searing spasms, before her physical form ran out of the requisite energy to stay alive, or more likely before her mind collapsed under the pressure of terror.

She tried once more to free the arm trapped at her side, forcing it with all her might against the jagged rocks. She could feel some slight movement but she could also feel the rock tearing at her skin. She analysed her two simple but horrible options again:

1. Push through her body's protective impulses telling her that the sensations she felt when she tried to shift her body would inevitably lead to significant cuts with what she blindly estimated was a medium likelihood of gashing open her Radial or Ulnar artery and slowly bleeding to death. 

2. Stay still, conserve energy, keep calm and desperately hope that someone would see her car at the trailhead carpark. Pray that maybe the trip register book at the entrance of the cave where she’d dutifully written her entry time actually gets checked. Wish that one of her friends that she had spent her entire life keeping at an emotional arms length may suddenly have reason for concern when she doesn’t reply to a text for a few days. Like she always did.

As her chest expanded in slow measured breaths she felt the narrow rocky passage compress around her then release. With each constriction now she felt an overwhelming desire to cry. Not quite with panic, something else, maybe grief. Then she was lying on the sand of a river bank. She was with a group of friends that had been part of her life for as long as she could remember. They were on day two of a five day hike. The intensity of the long climbs and heavy packs had been a strangely comforting distraction from recent loss. But here lying on the banks, covered in flies like a forgotten corpse she began to sob. The pain had been tracking her for days, weeks, months, probably years, occasionally catching her but always in close pursuit. The tears came despite her best efforts to hold them off. Her harder emotions were usually reserved for moments of isolation or at least spurred her towards it but here in front of her old loves there was no hiding from the vulnerability. Then without warning another body was compressed against hers, pinning her down like a sort of warm human weighted blanket. It wasn’t scary and besides the random sticks and pebbles poking into her it was barely uncomfortable. It felt familial and somehow also universal. Like in the moment her friend was one side of the embrace and the earth, the sand was the other side. She felt that again now as she quietly sobbed. Each soft child-like sniffle she felt held, infantile in the embrace of these massive ancient rocks. These gigantic unyielding predictable parents. 

She had understood for a long time, since the years of naive psychedelic experimentation and the coming of age style metaphysical interrogation of her youth that everything is technically the same thing. And yet here she was, a tiny separate thing slowly dying amidst other uncaring and separate things. 

Time was lost in the darkness. She thought of her own parents, letting her eyes sweep back and forth across the intricate geological patterns again. 

And then she was five, at the public swimming pool. One of the rare times she remembered her dad taking her to a place intended for enjoyment. Even at that age she was acutely aware of his pain, his anger, his loneliness, usually much more than she was aware of her own. They were playing or something akin to that. But the situation felt foreign to her, this sort of interaction with a caregiver was a concept she understood but one she had rarely experienced.

All of a sudden she was under water, her fathers strong adult hand holding her tiny body beneath the surface. She was flooded with panic, not the first time she had felt it but maybe the strongest in her so far short and complicated life. It felt like she had been down there for hours, desperately grappling against his arms. Then as quickly as she had learned what terror felt like he was picking her up under her arms as she coughed and spluttered and cried. 

But he’d only been joking. The infliction of this torment had only been intended as a sort of prank. Part of a larger generational misconception that children must feel pain as part of their development. Just one of the many times that the words “get over it” or "harden up” was said in lew of “I’m sorry I don’t really know what’s appropriate for a child because I was also treated like this”.

And here she was “hardening up”. The tiny rock passage she was trapped in was infinitely harder though. She had spent a lifetime trying to find safety in self reliance and solitude and hardness. It had always led her to places like this. Never as bad as this though. She flicked through the highlight reel in her mind of the times she had come closest to death. Most of them were out of the classic prefrontal underdevelopment of her teenage years, drunk driving or ingesting unknown substances. But this trip had been a stretch. Solo caving is recommended by zero out of ten seasoned spelunkers. 

She hated that word, for the same reason she hated people that put hiking in their hobbies on dating apps. 

“Why do you always feel like you have to define your identity through such annoying restrictive boxes? You’re so obsessed with social capital and identity politics!” She was in a dimly lit suburban living room now, half drunk and frustrated. “You only see yourself through your own victimhood, like you're just a big bundle of diagnosis and hyper specific interests and quirky character traits“. 

She had thought she had been joking, poking fun at her partner with a level of sardonic knowing but the next thing she said came out with a malice she hadn’t known she harboured. “You’re trying so fucking hard to be an individual so that someone will think you’re special enough to love”. Almost nine years later here she was, ever the individualist, trapped in a bleak introspective hell.

She guessed it had been close to eight hours now. Her head throbbed and her muscles tingled against the cold sharp rocks. She was delirious and yet could feel every sensation in her body with hyper clarity.

“Don’t call it a breakdown, call it a breakthrough” she said to herself quietly. Her mind clumsily stumbled around some loose semblance of logic, trying to form a hypothesis for how this nightarish situation was where she was meant to be. Her thoughts were sharply interrupted by what she could swear was something crawling on her ankle which was still poking out of the tiny rocky passage she had become trapped in. 

Her imagination exploded with images of long spindly legs and razor sharp poisonous pincers. Were they all over her now, writhing and scuttling across her constricted body? She took a slowly shaky breath and tried to swallow despite her dehydrated throat, now raw from her earlier attempts to scream for help. 

“It’s just a spider” she said to herself, holding the tupperware container up to her face. She was in the sun, on a family holiday at some friend of a friend's shack in the forest. The huntsman that her younger sister had caught in the bathroom with ease and fearlessness now clung rigid and alert inside the transparent tupperware.

“It’s not even the fear of one biting me, it’s just the unpredictability that scares me” she was saying. She lay on the weathered deck which overlooked the valley and warily placed the container on her forehead so that all that separated her and the palm sized spider was two millimetres of plastic. The spider laid dormant then quickly scurried and stopped again, searching for an escape route, not understanding that there was none.

Based on the size of the creature now crawling up her leg she guessed it was probably a Nullarbor blind cave spider. She remembered trying to commit the latin name to memory when she had been researching the trip, although she hadn't known why. “Troglodiplura” she shuddered as if the name contained mythic status. 

She remained perfectly still as it reached the section where her arm was compressed against the rock, half expecting it to start eating a path through her flesh. Then, with the fluidity of a thing perfectly evolved for this environment, it tapped its way over the top of her arm, finding some tiny gap and continuing its ascent up towards her shoulder. With each tiny pointed step she felt the spider crawl up her body and in a moment it was on her neck. 

The headtorch flickered again. She couldn't have moved her neck even if she had wanted to. Panic. Breath. Calm. And then suddenly, with what could only be described as intention it stopped just behind her left ear and perched, unmoving. 

More undeterminable time passed, minutes perhaps. She tried counting to take her focus away from the inexplicable terror of her current situation. But something kept distracting her, some untraceable high pitched hum. She couldn’t tell if it was some internal noise, tinnitus or thrumming from her aching head or if there were real stimuli being perceived by her aural senses. 

The noise began to fluctuate with minute intonation. For a second she thought it sounded almost like a distant piece of machinery or vehicle but quickly she realised there was no pattern to it at all. The tiny breaks sounded almost like the pace of speech. “Ee ee, ee ee ee ee eee, ee ee ee?” 

She listened intently, attempting to quieten her already restricted breathing to a slow whisper. And then suddenly, with a sort of magic eye-like shift the noises took form as tiny distinct words. “What are you doing here?” the little voice said again in a half squeak half buzz. She flushed again with panic. “Insanity. This is what madness feels like” the words danced in her mind's eye, illuminated in a hazy glow.

 “What are you doing here” she repeated to herself outloud, trying to bring understanding not to the words themselves but to how they could possibly have come from something other than, separate to, herself. “What do you mean what am I doing here, I live here” the voice faintly squeeked. “Who’s saying that? I can barely hear you. Are you here to help?” she uttered shakily.

She felt the spider move again and slowly, almost gently crawl into her ear. Something broke inside her. Her body could not sustain the control she had somehow held onto up until this point. All at once she screamed and threw up and then passed out.

She awoke to the squeaking, now an audible voice that sat nestled in against her ear drum. “My name is Oikos” it said. “What are you doing here?” it piped up again. She knew this couldn’t be real but in the delirium of her pain and fear she submitted. “I…I came here to try and have an adventure but I’ve gotten stuck.” “What's an adventure?” the spider replied with genuine curiosity. “Ummm… it’s like… something people do to give their life accomplishment…or like…meaning..?” she mumbled back hazily. 

The spider said nothing for a moment, trying to understand some of these foreign concepts. “What meaning is here that is not where you came from” it asked. Her mind, still in a semi catatonic confusion, tried hard to parse the spider's question. “Where I come from, my home, we stay inside. Our lives are mostly the same thing. We like to go outside sometimes and experience new things” she replied. 

The spider shifted slightly in her ear canal as if it was trying to get comfortable then settled again. “Where is my home? Is it in the caves or in the overland?” the spider said sweetly. She felt like this must be some sort of dream or nightmare, perhaps an extremely bad trip. But she couldn’t struggle anymore. She gave in and continued to answer the spider's questions.

More time had passed. Her whole body was numb, her mind felt almost empty. They had covered a lot of ground in their discussion. The more she tried to explain the human world the more ridiculous it had seemed. The more the spider explained its reality the more she understood some deep truth within her. 

“So you have made your life into two places” the spider summarised. “In one place you exist but in body only, you may get glimpses of the full world but mostly you are like a rock in motion. But sometimes you will be adventure, where you leave your home and feel everything. Is that correct?”

“Umm, yeah more or less” she replied. “And for you there is only adventure right?” “Well there is also death but we believe that is another form of adventure," the spider replied. 

“I want to live like you” she said, surprising herself a little. “Wait, don't I need to get out of here, don’t I need to get back to my life?” she thought as if in an argument with herself. 

She was flying now. Hovering about her suburb. She could see people going about their domestic lives as she glided above. And then she was over her house. The roof was transparent and she could see countless versions of her in rapid activity, scurrying around inside the four walls. She saw one staring into a blank screen and one staring into a mirror and one lying in bed awake. There were hundreds of them, all living out her real memories in that place. Occasionally one of her friends would walk into the house and interact at 10X speed. Each time a friend would enter she was filled with joy and then when they left she would feel a sort of peace. She watched her life in fast forward, the house occasionally changing shape, the scurrying ants often changing age and size.

And then she was back but the argument was settled. “I wish to live like drifting clouds with a heart that dwells nowhere.” She said to the spider. Can you please build me a home here out of your webs, I want to watch the wind destroy it. I want to watch it disintegrate and change form. I want only things I cannot cling to.”

“Of course I can, my love” replied the spider as it slowly unfurled and climbed out of her ear. She watched as the spider began spinning a beautiful elaborate web just in front of her face. She marvelled at its incredible talent. Her body felt no pain, her mind felt only awe at the intricacy of the creation happening before her. As the spider proudly showed her what it could do her head torch flickered once more and then went black, completely and finally.

Time was no longer now. Her silken webbed home surrounded her on every side. She was in a cosy temporary cocoon. The spider had left long ago and she felt peace. There was no escape, there was no desire, there was just her flickering consciousness.

And then a voice.

“Hey that’s her, guys, I’ve found her, quick”. More voices now. “Miss, can you hear me, we’re going to get you out, don’t worry, we’re here to save you, I think she’s still alive”. The words washed over her like water, like wind. 

From somewhere deep she replied “I’m all good”