Trespasser

My island is more beautiful than any tropical paradise or holiday destination on this earth, and it's a far easier commute. It requires no luggage, no security check, no long-haul flight, and no jet lag. I can go whenever I want, and I do as often as I can. I have more grounding here than where my feet actually touch the ground. Though here, I feel a very real sensation of warm grainy sand between my toes as I bury them into two little hills.

I've been coming here for so long that I know every placement of palm trees and every washed ashore shell. Everything is where I left it ready for me when I return. The sounds are predictable notes I could play on my piano as though recited a thousand times. Every wave hitting the shore and every gentle brushing of leaves in the wind, it's always the same. It never storms and there are never clouds in the sky. There is no debris washed up on the beach and I require no bug spray. Not even the sun damages my skin. There are no surprises here in the corner of my mind, I am safe as the creator and every grain of sand or pink pebble rejoices when I visit.

I breathe the clean air into my lungs and exhale the stress and pain within sending it to the depths of the ocean as though the tide comes to collect them and then after a beat, drags it out only to be swallowed by the abyss. Each one drowned in that perfect crystal desert as if each shimmer is a purified jewel that was once a putrid cloud in my mind. Although this time as I look out at my collection I see a rouge gem splashing around.

This doesn't belong, who let that in? I feel annoyance rise in my belly as the serene goddess on the beach disappears into a wolf barring its teeth at a threat to its territory. The floating intruder swam its way closer to shore, turning from a dark shape into the clear outline of a human swimming in the ocean.

In the real world, I might have run to this person's aid... but this is my island, and they were not invited. I stood to my feet, fist clenched and head held high as I watched this small child-sized body drag herself, fully clothed from the water. She clamored to her feet, drench the water from her hair, and breathlessly dragged a large black sack toward me. The bag was leaking a trail of tarry sludge on the white sand and despite my sheer will (which should have been enough), and cries for her to stop, she kept coming towards me with a scowl on her face.

"Who are you?" I demanded. "You know what, it doesn't matter. I will you to leave immediately!"

Surprised that didn't immediately work, the young girl kept coming until she was close enough to haul the bag at me, getting my sun-kissed feet covered in the thick ink-like sludge. The girl stared at me as if expecting an explanation. "Remember me?" she said.

"What, are you supposed to be my inner child or something" I entertained until I noticed her shoes. Water was leaking from the seams, but they were the unmistakable, much coverted by me, unicorn embroidered plimsolls of Sophie Osborne... the bully that lived next door when I was a kid.

"Yep!" She snapped. "Me!" she trudged up the sand and plonked her butt down hard next to me, crossed her arms, and stared back to the ocean she'd just escaped from. I cautiously sat back down next to her.

"Why are you coming up? I've not thought about you in... forever." Dumbfounded, I looked her over, surprised at every detail I managed to recreate so clearly of a girl I had forgotten.

"It must be important if you dragged me out." She replied, looking back at me. "Your precious fortress of paradise."

"Well, I hardly think I need to share it with my childhood bully. I'm going to come back into my living room now and tomorrow when I return, you won't be here." I readied myself to come out of my meditation. I felt my body in the 'real' world and tried to open my eyes... only to find that they wouldn't open and I wasn't able to leave. I tried again... and again...

"How many thoughts and anxious feelings of yours have you polluted into this ocean?" I heard the small child question next to me. "This is where you come to dump your problems right? How many of them do you actually face?"

Besides the sudden claustrophobic panic that I routinely banished to the ocean, I decided that this must be a real breakthrough in my meditation. It's nothing like something I had strived for this evening, but clearly, my subconscious wanted me to face some suppressed trauma from childhood.

"Ok, Sophie. What are you here to tell me?" I said, going back to my serene goddess persona, ready to do some real inner work.

"I'm not here to tell you anything" She replied.

I thought for a moment. Meditating within the meditation "Ok. So it's something I need to tell you...or myself." I cleared my throat, connected with my inner being, remembering the teachings of self-love I'd learned about in... one of those books on my nightstand.

I took a deep breath in, returned to the present, and closed my eyes. "I did not deserve to be bullied. The words you used against me, I no longer hold true. I am not fat. I am beautiful. I am not strange, I am perfect" I recited. "I am worthy of love and, Sophie: I forgive you. You did not mean what you said to me. You were going through your own journey and your words no longer affect me." I gave myself a moment or two to really feel the words I had said, to truly believe them, knowing that when I opened my eyes the young girl who once plagued my would be gone. Wow, what a transformational meditation today. I can't wait to share this at yoga tomorrow.

When I opened my eyes again, a bemused young Sophie now stood in front of me, with nothing but the dripping bag between us.

"That's not quite right either" She smiled. She then proceeded to pull her stringy wet hair away from her face to reveal a scar that extended down her cheek and below her neckline "You already confronted me once before."

My heart sank into a pit deeper than the ocean I'd been sending my daily woes. The memories came flooding back as the cloudless sky turned grey and threatened with rain. The black sludge from the bag was no longer black, but a deep, deep red.

I tried again to wake up, I tried to move my body, but I could no longer feel it in the real world.

"Look in the bag" She ordered, and with shaky hands, I lifted a corner of the bag and peered inside. Screams were heard calling from inside it which echoed loudly in my head. There were shadows moving and there was a knowing that this bag was deeper than the ocean it came from.

"Start going through it." She said.