You sit on the pearlescent monobloc chair in the familiar backyard.
The evening light washes the day off troubled skin. An amber light that slowly melds into deep dark purple. The birds and frogs sing their final tune of the day. The wind gently scraping the rusting clothesline as you deeply breathe in and out.
This is your moment of peace, a moment of calm piano keys, their weight pressed into the ears. It’s a ‘window of tolerance’, a sheet of glass synths creating fractals of light in your mind. But the light opens up more than bargained for. The memories start coming back. The trauma, the cracks and the swell take over, unveiling different times and spaces of the past.
The backyard is gone, but the birds still chirp their song. Flying through the midnight sky with a magpie, you pass through clouds of heavy bass and trip-hop drums. Harrowing flutes that may as well be wolves howling to the opulent crystal moon, surround the mix. They glitch and delay as they continue to bombard. You push on, white-knuckling the chair and reminding yourself that you’re ‘bulletproof glass’. Close your eyes and drink in a tall glass of cold air, breathing out with a renewing “ahh”.
Opening your eyes, there’s a murky and lively rainforest. Asking yourself, ‘am I here?’, as buried rituals of the bush reveal itself. Glitchy witch-like whispers, snapping sticks and elemental bowls being knocked around ancient ground. Even the insects add to the sonic cacophony as their hundreds of hit-hat legs skitter constantly over old crumbling leaves. It’s time to turn to a new one.
A blink, and an ethereal cosmos surrounds everything. Twinkly stars of synths fall like droplets onto an endless lake and the poetic voice memos you made when you were 18 echo back from the past. You could disassemble into a thousand suns. Every memory, moment and snapshot individually separated by a blank abyss but still connected with uncompromising lights of memory. You command yourself to ‘hold my skin’.
The galactic abyss takes on a shade of cerulean. Sitting at the bottom of an ocean, the fishes emanate elongated siren calls as they fly past. ‘when they’re not looking’ you focus on malfunctioning beeps and electronic loops. Sonars of sound detecting pieces of the past that swim in the depths of the mind. Eyes close.
Eyes open. Sheets of wind brush the reeds of the river bank. Staring at the warbling snake of water now in front of the chair, you realise this winding river is the great ‘Wambul’. Ignore the distressing mechanical churnings coming from the distance. Instead embrace the gargling water that washes over the ancient pebbles in electronic clicks and clacks. The field recordings of the birds settle the soul. The weight of the past recedes. Peace is near, the ambient pianos tell it so. You’re almost as free as the soaring birds, but you are still a lone stalk on a ‘swan lake’. Distant whistles call over, rippling through the shimmering synths of the water. Haunted voices of the past try to crack into your mind with the beating of your heart, but you don’t let them win.
Heavy trip hop drums crash around the ethereal chimes and keys, unlocking a sense of weightless freedom. You’re ready to soar anew like the winged fauna of the Mulubinba. The past can’t hurt anymore. As you sit in the cozy office, you remember to yourself that ‘I’ve been talking to my therapist again, To see it for how it is’. Finally some true comfort. A peace that is real.
Blink again. You never left the backyard. It’s just you, the monobloc chair and your ‘prefrontal cortex’. It all looks the same as before, but you are forever changed and pure. Transformed and renewed.
Words by Zachariah Tritsiniotis