Despite this, with summer on the horizon, my turmoil seemed to be relenting to my persistent belief that things would get better. One sunny evening I took my bike out from my back porch and made my way down to the budget grocery store near my house. Two years prior at another low point in my life, I had been permanently evicted from that store for shoplifting. Two years is a long time though, and I doubted they remembered me, so I would shoplift again from time to time, keeping an eye out and putting the merchandise in my bag as I perused the aisles.
Soon after my bike hit the pavement I saw two rabbits mating in the park near my house, with a third sitting and watching from off to the side. Sometimes these things move me to tears, I see life around me engaging with the world in such an unburdened way and I start to spiral on my own sense of alienation. Maybe if I could have just had a normal job and normal expectations from life I would feel more stable. Somehow my expectations never seem to match with the reality presented to me, and I have a hard time entering that reality as an active participant as it doesn’t come naturally. Sometimes I wish I was even the third rabbit, watching unselfconsciously like that. I’ve always admired people who experience things without questioning whether it’s the right or wrong kind of way to experience a thing.
I honestly don’t want to shoplift any more. I had outgrown my compulsion for it, and although it served a practical function now, I made a decision on my ride down to never shoplift again. Often upon leaving a store, once the paranoia was gone, I would get this awful sense of shame burning down my throat like boiling syrup. This time, I told myself, I would put it on my credit card and save myself from that horrible feeling. Parking my bike on the side of the building, I passed the two sets of sliding doors and kept my head down as I walked under the CCTV camera. I turned left at the third aisle to fill my basket with spices and canned beans. I passed a few mothers with their children in tow, but the store was otherwise empty. I paid at the self checkout and went to leave when I felt a hand press up against my lower back in an assertive and intimate way.
Surprised, I turned around to see a young woman staring at me intently although her face was a little blurry. I forget what I said but she pursed her lips and said something back that I also forget, and led me off to the right, past the cashiers and into a backroom with staff lockers and camera feeds from around the store. I don’t remember exactly what happened, as my brain was operating differently. I saw her lips moving. I’d been in the room before, when I’d been caught two years ago. I started to imagine that I was making my way through tall grass at the end of a summer day and the sky was pink in that special way that's only there for a couple weeks and there was not that much moisture in the air but I couldn’t see that well and my breath was coming out slowly and there were small inoffensive flies that were buzzing overhead and the ground was accommodating to my feet and I could smell something familiar. After a while I came back to reality to find I was alone in the room. I tested the door but it was locked.
I sat back down and waited. The door opened.
The first person through the door was the woman who had stopped me. She had soft features. The second figure was roughly my height and wrapped in a hooded cloak, and I couldn’t make out anything from behind the cowl. After recovering from my episode, I sat poised and open, trying to physically express that I was at ease and no threat to public safety. ‘Good Day’ I said ‘What is Going On?’ Obviously relieved to see me talking, the woman who stopped me introduced herself as Camilla. She told me that the —— (name of the store) has been using a new type of intelligence software for facial recognition and I came up in their database as a criminal trespassing on their property. She had detained me on these charges, and had only refrained from calling the police because I was having some kind of episode. The second figure brought their hands up and slowly removed the hood. ‘Hello, I am Samantha. I am a sound healer and Camilla brought me in here to tend to you’. She had alert eyes, and I could sense goodness. ‘Despite Camilla’s misunderstandings and scorn over my psychological practice, she did turn to me first, for which I am grateful - and you should be too.’
I couldn’t think of much to say, I wanted to let both of them know I was quite sorry for my transgressions against the store. ‘I’m very sorry for my transgressions against the store,’ I said humbly. I thought it might be too much to hang my head in shame, although shame had caught up to me already. I kept my gaze steady but I was falling apart inside. I didn’t want criminal charges, and I knew they were well within their rights to call the police. Oddly, neither of them uttered a single word. I saw Camilla tensing her facial features like she was holding something back. Samantha struck me as quite an impressive figure in her hooded cloak, and I felt a sense of awe come over me. She knows something important, I thought to myself.
Camilla had had enough of the silence, and I saw her hand fidgeting with the strap of her taser. As though she was choosing each word carefully, she said ‘Samantha has this idea that you need something other than punishment to unlock what is good inside of you.’ Camilla then said ‘I am trying to learn more about how to approach justice from a holistic perspective, so I’m going to give you two options or I’m calling law enforcement:
- You pay back your debt to —— in labour. You will owe two months of part time work at a cash register.
- You let Samantha lead a ritual to ground you into your confidence and goodness and expunge your poor behaviour. We will not tell you what the ritual is.
Camilla stared at me hard. After a second she said “Samantha says she wants to help me too with something… I can’t say I trust her, but I have a dark shadow that follows me. Not the ordinary one, but a second one that sits down on the chair next to me at meal times, and makes me feel like there is a bubble of hard air that’s spun around my head when I am alone and it scares me’. She ran her hand over her taser again. ‘She thinks we can help each other’.
I reflected on this. I didn’t like working. I felt like I could trust Samantha. She had a cooling effect. I didn’t want to think too hard anymore. ‘Samantha, Camilla, I will take the second option. What is it?’
Samantha spun and struck off the lights, leaving the room lit only by the soft glow of the CCTV footage. From my bench, I saw Samantha and Camilla disrobing. Samantha, in one fluid motion dropping her garb to reveal a nude figure underneath. Camilla began by unlacing her military grade boots and once those were off, she went from the top down. She looked soft. She was wearing a little silver necklace and matching bracelet. Samantha quietly commanded me to remove my own clothing, although I have no memory of hearing the words out loud. To my surprise, I had trouble getting my pants off because of how hard I was. I was scared but relieved to be able to have something to do.
I smelled a pleasant odour coming from where the two women stood. Samantha rummaged in her cloak and brought out two strung instruments on wooden frames that I had never seen before, and set off a pair of ringing notes as she began to play for us.
Despite Camilla's firmly set jaw, I could see how her body relaxed to the music, and I felt my inhibitions lower as well. It was obvious what was supposed to happen. I could smell her pheromones from across the room. I let instinct take over and I moved towards her. I got on my knees and went to take a dental dam from the desk, when the music stopped. I heard the electric crackle of a taser. I looked up at Camilla but she was staring down at me bare handed. I turned my head to see Samantha smiling knowingly at me, hand on the taser. She shook it back and forth in gentle rebuke until I dropped the dental dam. She picked up her instruments and resumed the music. I used my mouth and hands. Each time I would start to slip away into my world of fantasy, I would hear the taser behind me and the electric air would snap me back into the present. I didn’t stop until I felt the waves of pleasure roll over Camilla.
We made love in a number of positions, and it was good.
I felt the inside of her reacting to the music, grip and pull, grip and pull, almost like she was trying to take something off of me. I began to feel very close to her. I felt like I had been experiencing my emotional world through a burlap sack, and the mesh was spreading apart, life was coming into greater clarity. It wanted to see reality so badly my chest hurt. My soul felt held down by a weighted blanket, and when she would grip and pull, a lightness took over, the weight lessening. As I approached climax, the bag ripped wide open, the music sped up and the blanket was lifted. I ejaculated deep inside her, I felt human.
I closed my eyes. I was swimming, along with millions of others just like me, seeing millions of perspectives at once. We were racing through a familiar tunnel, but heading in a different direction than normal. I was pure being, part of a larger collection of existence. I followed the stream and we spread that presence and existence wherever we could - letting our oxygen mix with our hosts, bringing light into darkness and filling fissures in the tissue. Cool pond on the night of a full moon, a soothing force.
When I opened my eyes again, Camilla and I were cocooned in Samantha's warm cloak, holding each other tight. She was breathing softly on me, both of us spent completely. Samantha had her hands over us, humming a frequency that I could barely make out. I drifted back to sleep, watching the comings and goings of the shoppers on the display screens.
When I left the next morning, I felt liberated. Camilla had no tension in her face, and her features radiated light and warmth.
I earnestly thanked Samantha. “Thank you Samantha, I feel changed.” “Please Don’t Worry about me now. I won’t come back and trespass, I have learned my lesson, and am grateful to have been met with compassion and sex rather than a court order.” You are a good person, I whispered. I kissed Camilla on the forehead and I never saw either of them again ever.
