The Writhing Session 5

“Let’s try something a little more exciting,” Marinda says as she turns the dial on the machine. She puts on the goggles.

Andrea closes her eyes and opens them.

Andrea and Marinda are on a rollercoaster in the car behind a young Andrea and her dad.

“What happened on this day!” Marinda shouts over the screams of excitement.

They slowly ascend the incline. The rollercoaster cars rode down the decline and Marinda’s remote fell out of her pocket. It fell to the ground and broke apart. It sent a blast wave throughout the memory.

The rollercoaster stopped and the ride was over.

“This was the day my father and I went to the amusement park. He bought some beer during lunch and threw a bottle at another patron. We were kicked out of the park and I had to call my mom to pick us up,” Andrea replies.

Andrea and Marinda followed the little girl and her father to the cafe in the park.

Little Andrea ordered a sandwich and a water, while her father ordered a cheeseburger and a beer. They ate at the dining table outside. After a few beers, her father threw his last beer at the cashier when she said he had enough. The park’s policy was five beers per day. They were escorted off the premises and little Andrea called her mom from a nearby payphone to pick them up.

“I’m sorry you had to go through all that, but even as a child, you knew the right thing to do,” Marinda admires.

“Thanks, my dad was a bad influence, but young me didn’t let it affect her.”

“And he shouldn’t affect you now, he’s moved on and so should you.”

“I know — ”

A glitch in the machine caused it to switch to a different memory.

“I thought you had control of this!” Andrea shouted.

“I do,” Marinda checked her pocket and found nothing. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“I lost the remote, but I guess we can wait until the timer runs out.”

They waited an hour and the memory of her first soccer game without her dad watching replayed.

“What happening?” Andrea asks.

“I don’t know, but I think the machine is glitching out and we have to travel through each memory until you make a breakthrough.”

“What, how long will that take?”

“As long as it takes. Now let’s go!”

They run through memory after memory, a heartbreak, a run away from home, a robbery. They stop at her first day of high school when she developed a crush on the boy in her history class.

“He was my first big crush. He would answer all the questions the teacher asked. I saw him sitting with his friends at lunch, I tried to wink at him, but I crashed into the student in front of me. My lunch launched onto the male student’s back. He was angry at first, but he just simply took off his sweatshirt.”

“Great we can talk about this later, onto the next memory.”

They stop in her college years when her male professor winked at her in the hallway. She didn’t know what to make of it at the time.

“Next memory!” Marinda shouts.

They stop again when the same professor looked down her blouse.

“I was uncomfortable by that, so I went to the bathroom and never went back. I transferred classes and never saw him again,” Andrea remembered.

“Men played an important role in your life, didn’t they?”

“They did and I grew from each experience and man. I just have to keep going and learn from every experience.”

Andrea opened her eyes from her memory trance.

Marinda removed the helmet from Andrea’s head.

“What happened?” Andrea asks, setting her hand on her forehead.

“You made a breakthrough, you realized that you grew from each experience and should continue to learn from each experience. It’s definitely a step forward in the right direction of healing and moving on.”

“I did, good for me.”

“See you next week,” Marinda laughs.