The quiet November night was coming to an end. The rain tapped rhythmically against the windowpanes, resembling the sound of a distant drum. He opened his eyes slowly. He had been having a beautiful dream: he felt the mountain wind brushing his face, admiring the peak of Mont Blanc looming in the distance. He dream of his beloved Alps. The place where he grew up… This nearly 35-year-old man with grey-hazel eyes, well-built, with light stubble, was smiling just like a small child.
He glanced at his watch… only 5:07. Ealing Broadway was slowly waking to life, and he still had four hours before work in The Square Mile. His thoughts drifted from the Alpine peaks toward the tasks awaiting him at the bank today… That thought of his work… was like a trigger… Suddenly, his eyes clouded over, and the smile on his face turned into a grimace of pain – rising like a tide, piercing his temples, a pain impossible to bear. Another attack. Instinctively, he reached for the bottle of pills but knocked over a business card. He picked it up; it was the address of a well-known bioenergy therapist, Mrs. Ann. With tired, pain-filled eyes, he looked from the pills to the card. The pills didn’t solve the problem – after taking them, his brain didn’t function normally; it was dull and heavy, unfit for work. His gaze wandered back to that funny, shiny scrap of paper, which offered a shadow of a chance, a hope so contrary to his nature. After all, he was a banker; he always kept his feet firmly on the ground. And here was some magic, bioenergy, charlatanism…
He looked around his cramped, expensive apartment. The suit hanging in the wardrobe cost a fortune. Hard work, hours spent in front of screens, the stress eating him alive from the inside – all of this barely sufficed to maintain this illusion of success. An illusion that didn’t warm him, didn’t bring joy, didn’t let him breathe. Being stuck. That was the only feeling that remained. I must be more productive… I must fix my head to break free from this place – such were his delusional thoughts at the time.
He made a decision – he would try this madness. He put on his best grey wool suit and got on the tube.
He arrived at Trafalgar Square, which was slowly waking up, filling with people. The raindrops gave way to shy rays of sun piercing through the clouds. He headed toward a narrow street, to a small office next to the esoteric Watkins Books. The door was opened by a woman with a face marked by life and an incredibly calm gaze. Mrs. Ann.
When he crossed the threshold, a small room appeared before his eyes. The central point was a large, round oak table, on which rested a transparent crystal ball, tarot cards, and several heavy wax candles that provided light. Right next to it, pulling the gaze almost by the force of gravity, was a wide, low bed, tightly covered with a thick grey wool throw and invitingly sunken pillows. Everything in this room — from the scent of melted wax and dry wormwood to the absolute, dense silence — spoke of a place where time slows down, and attention turns inward. It was a space not for living, but for being.
Mrs. Ann didn’t ask much. She listened to his curt explanation about the migraines, the helplessness of doctors, about the fact that his “head wasn’t working.” – Very well, please lie down, try to close your eyes, and breathe calmly – she pointed to the bed.
The scent of sage filled the air. He felt her hands hovering a few inches above his body. They did not touch the skin, and yet he felt a strange tingling and a light tickling sensation. Her right hand hung motionless over the top of his head like an anchor, while her left, like a sensitive sensor, began a slow, targeting movement downwards. He felt like an object being scanned by an invisible instrument.
Mrs. Ann’s left hand glided slowly, with intentional certainty, stopping every few seconds as if sensing the resistance of matter invisible to the eye. The first stop was over his forehead – right above the bridge of the nose, where all the tension of the migraine had gathered. She paused there for a long, focused moment. Then, unhurriedly, she moved down, suddenly hovering over his throat, as if she wanted to loosen a tightened knot of unspoken words. The next place where she stopped for even longer was the area of his heart. Here, her hand trembled slightly, and he felt an unexpected, deep prick of sadness, which immediately subsided. Her hand moved further, down his abdomen, stopping a few more times at smaller, invisible barriers.
Suddenly, Mrs. Ann sharply pulled back both hands. Tension hung in the air, thick and tangible, like before a storm. He felt a strange, warm-cool energy piercing him through, from head to toe, pushing the rooted spasm out of his muscles. He closed his eyes, and in his mind, there appeared a sensation of light spinning, of detaching from the bed. Frightened by this detachment, he instinctively “returned” to his body with a slight jolt, like after a nap. When he opened his eyes, he saw her hands making final, quick, circular motions, as if wrapping and gathering invisible, heavy yarn from above his head. The silence in the room was different now – deep, cleansed. And the headache… was gone. It wasn’t muffled, it wasn’t dulled. It simply wasn’t there. All that remained was the memory and an unusual, glass-like clarity in his temples.
“What happened?” he asked, and his own voice sounded foreign – calmer than he remembered. “Well,” Mrs. Ann replied, wiping her hands on a linen cloth as if removing invisible dust from them. “I have temporarily removed the blockages. I loosened the knots that had tightened in your field. But they will return.” Her gaze was hard, devoid of illusions. “I sense a tension in you that isn’t ordinary stress. It is… longing. I feel it like a fissure in your aura. As if you were not in the right place. Or perhaps… you are where you shouldn’t be? Do you yearn for something?”
Silence fell, in which only the hiss of the burning-out candle could be heard. He rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, as if looking inside. “Yes,” he whispered finally, without opening his eyelids. “Sometimes I dream of my mountains. Of my Alps.”
Mrs. Ann leaned in slightly. Her voice became even quieter, but every word carried the weight of a final diagnosis. “Perhaps you should return to them. This isn’t just advice. I don’t think this – I feel it. In you. Your spirit is where the clean air and mountain peaks are, not the vertical walls of glass office buildings. And your body here, in this cage of concrete and lights, is sick from separation. I feel that you know you should return. The problem does not lie in your head, young man. It lies in your heart, which beats in the wrong place. And I know you will return…”
He stood up and left, and the office door closed behind him with a quiet, final click. The weight of her words followed him step by step, denser than the London fog. “I know you will return.”
And what fate befell him, dear reader? This story has two endings. Two parallel paths grow from the same point on Trafalgar Square. The choice belongs to him. But does it really? Free will and free choice… what could be the difference?
ENDING ONE: With the Flow…
He returned to his expensive, cramped apartment. For a week, he walked like a ghost, and Mrs. Ann’s words pounded in his skull louder than any migraine. He looked at stock charts and saw trend lines, but his internal compass pointed only south. The fear was immense, paralyzing. But now he had a name for what he felt: longing. And longing, once recognized, becomes more powerful than fear. He took the risk. Resignation. His savings melted like snow in the spring sun. He went to Chamonix with one suitcase and his heart in his throat. He started from zero: carrying luggage, cleaning shelters, taking the simplest courses. Every time he had doubts and was about to return to London, something lucky appeared on his path – the right people, free courses… as if the cosmos was looking after him… He felt he was on the right path. His London precision and risk assessment skills, warped in the world of finance, regained their true meaning here – they protected life. He became a guide. His days were measured not by digits on a screen, but by meters climbed, wind strength, and the joy in the eyes of the people he led to the roof of Europe. Time, which choked in cyclical quarters at the bank, flowed here by the rhythm of the seasons and the beating of his own calm heart. The headache became a distant memory, an echo of an old sickness of the soul. He found his rhythm. He found himself.
ENDING TWO: Against the Current…
He returned to his expensive, cramped apartment. For a week, he walked like a ghost, and Mrs. Ann’s words pounded in his skull, but quieter with each day, drowned out by the internal monologue of reason. “Madness. Responsibility. Loans. What will they think?”. He clung desperately to the known shore, convinced it was stability, not cowardice. He buttoned his wool suit even tighter. He worked more to drown out the longing. Stress, that silent poisoner, seeped further. The migraines returned with doubled force, but he didn’t even reach for Mrs. Ann’s card anymore. He suppressed them with stronger pills, numbing himself for the sake of “proper functioning.” One day, during another crisis on the trading floor, when the digits on the screen danced a sinister dance, it wasn’t pain that exploded in his head, but silence. Darkness. He woke up in a hospital. Diagnosis: a massive stroke. Half his body paralyzed, speech slurred. His “safe” world collapsed in an instant. When finally, after months of rehabilitation, he could leave, he ended up not in Chamonix full of strength, but in a sanatorium in an Alpine resort. His family, full of compassion and care, surrounded him. He sat on the terrace in a wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the same peaks he had dreamed of. Mont Blanc loomed in the distance, now unattainable, eternal, and indifferent. The wind, which was once meant to carry him, now had to content itself with brushing the trembling blanket on his knees. He returned to his Alps. But not as their master and guide. Only as their saddest, sickly spectator. The cosmos was still calling, but he no longer had the strength to answer.
Two paths. Two lives. One leads uphill, through fear, toward breath. The other – downhill, through reason, toward suffocation. His history is not a tale of a good and bad ending. It is a mirror. It is a story about the price we pay for “being afraid,” and sometimes one simply must listen to the cosmos, to the soul, and simply “not be afraid,” following the voice of the heart…
And you, my dear reader, would you take the risk? Or perhaps you would stay stuck…? “Stable, albeit hopeless…” What could your path be if you woke up today at 5:07 with a pain that is not in your head, but in your heart? And does free will truly exist?
(If this story spoke to you and you wish to support my writing, you can always buy me a virtual coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/soulmarcin