A history student is tasked with sorting through an abandoned asylum's archives. The asylum is rumored to be haunted, but Lena dismisses this as merely town folklore. When her research brings her to venture inside the asylum's walls, however, the fr...
I probably should be doing more readings this afternoon, but I can't stand another afternoon in that stuffy library with its winding staircase and rows of students silently bent over musty books. I need fresh air and, as you know, my feet drag me to the asylum against my will. It's a bit of a walk. I have to pass by the prison, with its tall brick facade and menacing barbed-wire edges. Guards are stationed up in the rounded towers, overlooking the street and the prison courtyard at once. I don't know why, but I always duck my eyes down to the sidewalk when I pass by it, maybe out of humility, and my hands are digging into my pockets to fend off the cold.
When I do look up to the stretch of street ahead of me, I see it through the disorienting swirl of falling snow. It's all old houses down here, in the space between downtown and the bridge. Tall, imposing houses, that I think would terrify me if I had to live in them. I don't know why. One of them, belonging to some old government official, is open every summer for tours and it always gave me a nauseous feeling; beside each of these houses is a smaller structure of doorways, adjacent to the main home but separate enough. Servants' quarters.
The bridge that runs over the silver of the lake, and connects downtown to the asylum's hill and the distant subdivisions, always hums with the passing cars. It vibrates each time wheels go over it. It's steel and rickety - it's meant to draw up in an instant if a boat, on warmer days, wants to pass through.
Oops! Bu görüntü içerik kurallarımıza uymuyor. Yayımlamaya devam etmek için görüntüyü kaldırmayı ya da başka bir görüntü yüklemeyi deneyin.
I probably look quite odd, walking about under the thick of falling snow, face tucked desperately into a scarf. I turn up my music, always a trick I use to divert my attention away from the temperature. Right over the bridge, running left from the main road, is a path I try not to look down too often. When I do, I see a ghost of a younger me, summer dress swaying in the breeze. Barefoot; I was crazy. We were running down the path through the park that leads to the shoreline. That was one of the happiest days of my life, and you can never quite draw in the anchor of your first love. Your heart is always somewhat back there, no matter how many years stretch you away from it.
Of course, age brings a sort of clarity with it. And I don't know, several partners later, if there was anything particularly special about that first love of mine. I don't know if I loved him, or loved the way he quieted my mind a bit; it was the first time I realized that my anxieties were assuaged when I focused on someone other than myself... when I put him instead of my mortality at the centre of my thoughts. Probably not a healthy thing, either, both of them having the same fundamental feature of desperate clutching, but I wasn't really looking for healthy; I was just for any momentary band-aid. And I would tell him the details of my days instead of trying to scribble them desperately into books for future-people to read. I mean, if he knew my life or if someone else in the future knew it, it accomplished the same thing. Some need for expression - some need to know you're not living your life screaming into a void - was fulfilled by both. Such is how I got through highschool. And university too, really, but in different hands and against different faces and scenery.
