I
At the start of this year, I went for a walk.
I walked out of my final group CBT session in Brierley Hill, past the college, and began making my way down the hill. For the previous 12 sessions throughout the final months of 2019, I had gotten the bus straight away from up t’road, back down to Merry Hill, before getting another bus to Cradley Heath station, a train from there to Birmingham Moor Street, and walked through Digbeth into work. Today was different as it was a follow up session in the new year, taking place on the first Monday in January, and I didn’t need to go into work. This meant there was space to really exhale, to engage in processing the psychological distance travelled in therapy and let a range of emotions walk alongside me.
I had packed my camera with me, and snapped some things that interested me on the walk, past a combination of residential and industrial use sites and a great view of the Dudley Number One canal, continuing down past KFC and the ODEON cinema, where, unusually, I stopped to enjoy a rare frothy coconut milk coffee alone in the cafe. As the chair held my body like a mother holds a child, I could almost swear I felt the world spinning gently beneath me as I stared softly into the space around me, alongside a constellation of other people also drinking frothy drinks, eating overpriced toasted sandwiches and staring into the spaces between us.
