Borderliners Read Free

back into my head. I shut my eyes but her words coursed through my mind. I didn’t need this; furthermore I had to stay professional. But the temptation was great. I went back into the womb of my house, turned the light off and sat down. Like a self-harmer, I was really close to succumbing as the darkness of my sitting room closed in around me, the cloudy sky having blocked out the moon and the stars, and even, it seemed, the sounds of the outdoors. It was too quiet, the air hanging in thick patches around me. What if, what if , I thought. What if Martha wasn’t crazy at all, what if she had just fallen victim to darker forces? And what if those forces were operating somewhere nearby?

Chapter 2
    My treatment began when I was eight years old, a few months after the first visitations from my dead grandfather. He would appear in my dreams and whisper in my ear, in his thick Sicilian dialect, about returning the Rose to the Garden of Eden. I knew who he meant. People said I was imagining things, but I knew it was more than that. The night I saw my grandmother in my dream, lying on the floor surrounded by the cards and a glass full of the medication she’d failed to take, I tried to warn my parents. My mother lost it. But she’s going to have a stroke , I insisted, you need to keep an eye on her .
    My parents were afraid and I was packed off to a child psychiatrist faster than anyone could say ‘psychotic’. Of course, what I saw came to pass. It was exactly as I had forseen, to the very minute and down to the last detail. This only sent my mother into even greater turmoil, and rather than stopping my treatment, she intensified it.
    My psychiatrist was a boring old woman, stiff and uncompromising. Mean. I hated her. Her answer to my issues was to dose me up and attempt to change my behaviour with various different mind control games. My parents bought into her theories about discipline and training of the mind, and so I was doomed to her so-called ‘treatment’ for several years. At least my chosen form of physical discipline - Kung Fu - was fun to learn, and I practised yoga and meditation every day. It helped me excel in sports and, to the disgust of my younger sister, seemed to boost my academic achievements. Despite everything they put me through, I refused to tell them the visions were a figment of my imagination. Anything but that.
    My grandfather still visited me in my dreams, as real as ever. Nonna Rosa too, sometimes. If they were just figments of my imagination, then the real world didn’t match up. As revenge for my treatment, I decided to study psychoanalysis at university. In the future, people like me would be treated by those of us who had a more open mind, who didn’t believe the brain was a simple mechanism which had to be wired up either one way or another. There were so many permutations and varieties of normal, so many differences in the way people thought about things and their experiences of reality. I was determined to qualify as a psychotherapist so that I could treat people in a different way. I would be gentler and more careful with people’s precious minds. I would try to help them, and I wouldn’t tell them they had got it all wrong. Sometimes it seemed a tall order. Being so close to people who walked on reality’s borderline kept me close to the edge too.
     
    The gentle floating descent of something outside reflected on my computer screen as I waited for it to power up. It reminded me of snow until I saw the drifting items were large, wispy and flat, a reminder that the nights would draw in further and the trees lose all their leaves before winter was truly upon us. Born at the very beginning of January, I smiled at the thought that my favourite season was just around the corner. It was a shame my patients didn’t feel the same way and it was with some trepidation that I scrolled through my schedule for the day, knowing I would get busier as winter approached.
    I was glad I’d chosen