unlocked

Smashing the rusted lock broke a silence held for years. At first, I did not know why my heart became more still in the moment I stepped through the door of the old barn again, but it had been so long since my mind felt peace. Only ten years had passed, yet it was almost like returning to the womb, dark and cocooning, as if it were the only safe place imaginable; nothing really mattered behind the enormous doors, under the strange, broken, comfort of a familiarly leaking roof. Over the course of all of the years, such calm had become foreign to me, and almost threatening in its unusualness. I thought this place would trap me like a jail, but it had been its secret which kept me prisoner.

With no choice but to stay there, in the barn in the woods, I saw two out of three possible sunrises, in all their achingly beautiful golden glory. I listened to growing birds singing songs of their own new beginnings each unexpected morning. No monster came to devour me in the nights; I watched the denseness of the forest swaying, and the infinity of the sky stretching further than I could see in either direction, and every time I paused to do so, I waited for it to stop being so heartbreakingly beautiful; it never did.

***

They had called it a nervous breakdown. They told me my brain had become overwhelmed and stopped processing information. It seemed to happen with an incomprehensible suddenness. The morning had been nothing but normal. The afternoon began with a black hole, and what followed felt like being crushed in its inescapable vortex.

The truth can hurt with a savagery unparalleled. I run to protect myself, I run with fear: both looking over my shoulder and simultaneously hiding my eyes. Yet it is the secret from which I am running. All that perpetual movement, the constant avoidance; I needed to allow myself to see the truth, my truth. Nothing becomes invisible just because you have looked away. One lie becomes a hundred thousand pains when it is lived every day. A lifetime of shame eats into a soul until only the pain remains: exposed, raw, nakedly screaming. Eventually, every one of those pains came for me, together, to swallow me with the fervour of a hungry, dark, tornado.

It was a picture, just a photograph, that had led me back to the barn, that had sucked me into the black hole, that had been the only record of the one thing I had not wanted to, nor expected, to remember. Just a photograph that had commemorated the vacuum of memory, the only crack in my mind’s time capsule sealing my sanity. ‘Just’ a photograph of an old barn, ‘just’ an outbuilding in a wooded clearing.

I had to go back to the old barn. After the medications, the therapy, the wards, the worried looks and furrowing brows, the children’s scissors and the shoes without laces. The check boxes and their zombie routine of effortless and empty recovery. Make it so dull, nobody wants to stay. Make it so easy to lie, nobody even has to stay. After a while, even I had forgotten whether it had been a breakdown, or if that was just who I was underneath a well-worn suit of lies.

Nobody can make me feel anything, they told me. It is my own reaction to others shaping the way I feel. I create my own emotional spectrum, but sometimes it gets clogged with detritus along the way, or narrowed, or shortened. I am always in charge, it's just sometimes I can't find the reins. I need to keep trying. I heard all of their hollow words and I ticked all of their meaningless boxes. They sent me home to collect up all the broken parts for myself, through a clouded haze of multisyllabic nonsense drugs and a crippling collection of cliches. All of the pieces and none of the glue. I had to return to the barn.

In those haunting moments over those excruciating days, I could not comprehend everything that touched my existence; an ever-shifting landscape of fears and confusion. I had no means of navigation when the destination seemed fluid and the route was undefined. There were certainties, though, things that I knew, things I still know, immutable things: things that held the compass point in the right direction when I was present-minded enough to remember.

Today may be the most difficult day of my life, but the day will come to an end. The sun will rise again, and tomorrow will be different.

***

My truth is shaped by the fact that every choice I have made has brought me to the place I am now. I am the one who turned every corner on the path. It was always going to be a circle. It began at the barn, and I was always going to have to return to the barn.

Coming back came at the price of losing my mind, my job, my life – a false life built on all the lies I could feel collapsing within me every day for all those years. What to do with all of this? Let it go? The fear, the anger, the blame, the shame, the guilt, the regret - just let it all go? I cannot imagine resolving the pain I perpetuated through relentlessly magnifying those negative emotions. Every harboured agony I nurtured, picking over the past, allowing it to fester further into my future. There is a huge difference between taking responsibility for actions, or inactions, and being owned by them for the rest of time. Let. It. Fucking. Go?

***

I had been a teenager when he pinned me to the damp ground of the old barn. It had been a summer of weather which was generously remembered as disappointing. It was not what he did to me which shaped my future, but rather the aftermath, which began the sinking of my soul.

It had felt like love in the moments the sun shone, but that day, we had been angry. Angry with the world, angry with each other. He had tried to kiss me, but I only wanted to leave. Our petty anger was the spark from which his rage began, and my refusal became the tinder: our friendship tore apart with the sound of my dress as he grabbed at me. As I fell, my stomach lurched, with sadness, with loss, with fear, and with the primal instinct to survive.

His insistence was furious, and his strength, inescapable.

I want to pretend I cannot remember the object that I found with my desperate, outstretched fingers. I want to believe the humble garden tool was the one who found my hand, longing, needy, and frantic. I want to forget again the feeling of his warm blood on my skin; that sound of liquid mimicking rain through the leaking roof, the blackness of its pools, the crimson of it smeared on the whiteness of my chest. I cannot recall these things without the sickness of that day tearing apart at my insides again, like a ravenous beast.

I want to remember how his face changed. To see his anger transition through fear, my fear: to watch his once-enraged eyes being taken over by my own terror. As I watched that moment again unfolding, as if re-enacted by shadows, I felt my heartbeat soften, and my shoulders drop. I breathed deep the familiarity of the setting, now musty and abandoned, now forgotten and broken. I watched the ghosts again, letting them play out the scene slightly further; until the fear in his face was meaningless, breathless, and frozen.

***

Closing the door of the old barn behind me, I began my journey away from it again; it was different this time. I did not stop at the well, because my hands were empty, and I did not run to the stream, because my hands were clean.

***

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