Lights Out

On the way to her first therapy appointment with Jackie Weston, Lola found that, for some inexplicable reason, scenes from her childhood were now popping into her head. Although the day was sunny and the Santa Monica freeway was crowded with traffic, in her mind’s eye, she had been transported to her parents’ house in Boston, years ago, when she was about 13.

Letting herself drift, now, Lola recalled the times when, to escape the mid-summer heat and humidity, she would descend the house’s stairs, and enter the cool, musty, catacomb of the basement. Even though it had felt a little eerie, she liked the stillness and the feeling of total aloneness she experienced as she explored what felt like a “secret territory” that belonged only to her. She recalled now, a particular instance, when she had been exploring the shadowy nooks and crannies, and the basement lights had suddenly gone out, leaving her in total jet black darkness. She literally felt her way across the basement’s lightless wilderness, toward the stairway, and then on hands and knees, she ascended the stairs toward the dull and normal ‘everydayness’ of her well lit home, which, despite its seeming luminosity, sometimes felt to her far more like death and oblivion, than any pitch-black basement ever could.