Asylum

It was a dreary night of October 23rd. Fog floated low over the lake, dripping on my coat and blurring the footbridges beyond the pink house that sits on a hill in the distance. Something rustled in the brush, moss clinging to my boots.The cold wind howled through the woodland landscapes. Above the grounds, a foreign moon, full of a different angle of light than the one I’m used to from the beach. The mineral smell of wet earth, the lake’s black surface, the bright green moss I slip on as vines grip my socks. I expected the cryptic galloping of Headless Horseman to come through at any minute to collect my head with the others.

I came to the French countryside to write. A retreat, a sanctuary, a place where I might finally hear myself think. Instead, I feel like a character in a horror film, wandering through a beautiful setting while the audience waits for me to discover what has followed me here. My past, perhaps. Or something inside me.

I have never stayed still long enough to face it.

There is a grand piano and a bell that rings at dinnertime. In my private, theatrical version of the place, it summons all of us lovely lunatics from our rooms to feast. I imagine a pink asylum in the woods in the eighteenth century, where we come running down the stairs from our bedrooms. 

Everyone speaks of their work, of what is in motion, of what they hope to create. I listen with a napkin in my lap, and wonder how much anyone can see.

Everything is fashioned with splendor. Even my suffering has acquired a picturesque setting. I worry I am romanticizing my own stricken mind, casting myself as some tormented artist because there is history all around me, because even the rooms seem worthy of a story. I think of Van Gogh and feel uneasy about the comparison. I have come here to make something, but some days it takes all my effort simply to sit at the table.

I wander the halls in my best attire, trailing a finger along the banister. Its polished wood is clean. In the mirror, I study a woman I do not quite recognize, a lean, frail-looking body, a face that seems to have aged during the journey. I adjust my clothes as though the Parisian fabric and careful delicate seams might restore something I can remember about my passions.

Beneath the hot stream, I place my chest directly under the shower head, letting the pressure grind out the ghosts. I walk the grounds and pray. I seek out conversations when I begin to feel far away, following another person’s voice until I can enter the room again. Since arriving, I have felt tormented, and I could not tell anyone precisely by what.

While the others talk over wine about the triumph of what they will create, I write the horrors I have lived through as though they are ghost stories.

Still, there are moments I truly feel present, the glowing pink château beyond the hill at night, the little historic cemetery in the village, its stones paling in the gloom, the black chandeliers along the corridors. The way the stairs creak and the windows slam from the wind awaken me. I let myself take them in. I smile, even with the ache still there, and say, “It is well with my soul.”

I say it as an act of obedience, with much of me still afraid.

I think of the tortured artists who died by self inflicted tragedies, whose work later made fortunes that they never lived to see, and I want to change that trajectory for myself. I want to be here to hold the book, to hear someone tell me what a poem meant to them, to enjoy what my words might bring me. I want years in which I write about something other than what I survived. Here, I am still uneasy, still achy, but I want to live beyond the suffering I have learned to put into sentences.

I always wondered when I’d lay down my pen and retire from writing about grief, but it keeps finding another door into my life, so for now, I will play the part.

This is going to be the life I will share though no one will remember it that way.

Others will remember it differently—
the rooms we dined in,
the weather we felt,
even my very presence.

I will finish well. Unlike many brilliant artists, I intend to be alive for it.