I sit with my patients in the eerie Office of Oblivion,
a dark place for sufferers beneath the earth, and listen
to the horrific tales of their lives,

the traumatic tessellations of a repetitive past, a mosaic
of distressing patterns that occur again and again inside
the dark labyrinth of their existence.

And I hear their ululations, the haunting shrieks of babies
and children trapped in the unforgiving past, tortured by
loved ones or strangers, and devoured within the spiraling

circle of the snake again and again, for the past is now and
always, until it is released in a dark but illuminating moment
of miracles, and launched into the unfathomable universe.

We sit together in my subterranean Office of Oblivion, and I
listen to the voices of repetition compulsion that speak of an
ancient time of trauma.

And the voices reveal the meaning of despair and hopelessness
and victimization. But still, in the deep silence that follows the
cutting words of trauma, a hidden mosaic of hope and mastery

emerges, creating time and space for life, releasing death, an
antediluvian prison of the past, into the vast universe beyond.