Before the end of her gravel road there sits a barn that I happen across often. Inside awaits what I can only imagine, for the heavy wood doors will not budge. I peer every now and then. Who am I kidding? I peer whenever I can, when ever happens to turn my legs there. There’s no reason not to. For all these hungry eyes can tell the place is unknown. More precisely, the place is left, forgotten. Often, I push my eyes against the crack between those big doors, to reflect myself into the darkness. Of course, to no avail. Without light that knows how to bend and shape itself beyond the space between walls, the inside of the barn will stay dark. 

Grown thick up the side of the barn facing the main drag in the distance are dark green vines, perfectly paletted in color and presence with the flaked red paint that garnishes the wall. When I took myself there last, I thought cunningly to myself that the vines could be climbed, and the hatch—or skylight, or broken planks that must be atop the barn—could be forced open. It is obviously a foolish plan; I can’t remember having properly climbed since I was a little boy. I’m very sure the way in is up, up the vines. But I’m unsure of this surety. Perhaps it is all I have. I must know, I know I must! Next week, I will. 

⋯

Today is then. As I approached along the gravel, my feet began to itch terribly inside my shoes, as if hundreds of ants or dozens of spiders had hatched inside my socks. It was a most frightening feeling, that crawling energy that crept over my toes. For some reason, to unlace my boots, I sat on the side of the road, into the dewy, unkept grasses. There, untying the calfskin lace of my left boot, it occurred to me that maybe the ants and the spiders, or the annoyance itself, were figmentation. This was troubling, as it suggested a fear deep within, a fear of the inside of the barn. So I stumped, ass wetted, shoes half off, only 200 or so meters from the subject of my dreams. 

Good God, yes, subject! For frequently as of late, it is out from inside the damned and glamorous shack that I dream, gazing out from the slats of those tall doors. I see deer and mice foray out from the thicket behind the gravel road. They look past me, and I think nothing, nothing about questions, contexts, my being. But I surely was the barn. I was aware of a great something behind my eyes, a cache of… something, cautious. As I write now, reaching for the memories in the dream, I feel an undeadness, a weight… a waiting, and with every animal’s arrival afore me, an aching for something that could not, a renewed test of patience and purpose. My God. I’m disappointed I had not yet inquired into these dreams. Something is missing, maybe slinked away. When I wake, around 2 or 3, I think I think, but I’m erased, swallowed, not knowing. 

I suspect the barn’s unseen allure is a trove of memories, of a family, of spiders and horses, or a dragon. I just do not know but that she was here often, and it might be her. Didn’t feel like her. But what do I know?

Anyways, I sat on the grass this morning, itched in fear, and I knew I had ways to go. I laced my boots back up, and when I began to double knot them, it went away. The sense, the sight, the realization crawled my fear back into his belonged crevices. I rose, and then I felt like a predator rising from death, his kill. It will work, it must. I turned, turned, turned and walked. Home was all I wanted. I thought, I cannot find my dream on unsteady feet. Next week.

⋯

Today is not the day. I could feel it in my kitchen when I opened my fridge to drink my milk as I do in the morning. I always walk in the morning, leaving before the fog floats away and returning after it has.  I feel as though that way, the outside world manifests the changes upon me as I go. Unfortunately, these changes are infrequently profound. Most times, I simply remember how annoying it is to be walking when it is hot outside, because I get itchy, and I resolve to leave thirty minutes earlier the next weekend. I only go on Sunday mornings, before the world has gotten up from their Saturday night reveries. On Sunday mornings, I am special, to taste milk while most continue to breathe it. 

But when I drank my milk this morning, I felt it was an immature act, one unbecoming of a man about to witness the inside of the barn. I decided to walk up to the gravel road’s turnoff, but not down the road itself. I knew that if I started down the road, I would end up in front of the barn, and there I would feel like a complete failure once again. Today, I could only handle being a partial failure, as I am the rest of the days. Maybe one day I will become a partial success, and mount the vines. Maybe one day I’ll reject these simplistic notions, turn my back to her barn, and venture into the forest it watches. Yes, maybe I will reemerge ripe and quenching the barn’s thirst. In my dreams, I know the barn is waiting for a certain special soul. I am not so. Or not yet. I seek to rewrite the barn’s expectations of catharsis by entering it, learning it, and teaching it what it misses by realizing what it already has.

⋯

Today, on the bend before the turn onto the gravel road, a man strolled by me, and I nearly had an aneurysm. I had never seen anyone that far down the road, and for him to be happened across abrupt before the turn almost surely suggests he had seen the barn. I think the aneurysm was for this implication, which changes everything about my pursuit. How am I to know anymore? Before, when I was the only one, I guess I believed I had some divine intention, that the only reason I had decided to discover the barn’s secrets was because I was the only man who could, who saw the barn, or at least, had seen the barn since it had faded, forgotten, and flaked away. I thought myself the high right to know what was inside because I was the only one giving the barn the light of day. My attention made me deserve the barn. I thought my dreams and their profundity reflected this right. This, I see now, was stupid, and wholly inconsiderate of all that which is unspoken, unshared, undiscovered, all that I will never know. I feel impotent in this new knowledge. 

But as I write this, a new light of courage is dawning on me: my struggle, no longer immortalizing, takes on a new power of mortal goodness. I aspire and eventually I will achieve. My aspiration, if not impregnated in me by a force beyond my control, perhaps, as I once thought, a desire dormant within the barn, must then be inspired inside myself, not the breath but the lungs. This is beautiful, I feel, and it means I am certainly worthy of the barn. I feel traveling down from my heart through my wrist, which pulses with the force of my conviction, that next week will be the week. 

But how handsome that man was. He wore a knit sweater and slacks creased rightly. He had glasses on, dignified glasses. It is now laughably apparent to me that I was jealous of him, of what he might have seen, truths that my eyes have not yet, and could never see. Oh, the writhing torment! Please escape me. I cannot take this replaying animation of the barn doors opening for him. Even worse now, of him realizing an obvious way inside. Oh, and the thought of her long gravel road unfolding under him like a portal into the past. I shouldn’t call it hers still. It’s not hers or her family’s anymore. It’s mine, for all the barn seems to care. Or his. I should have gone down the gravel road, instead of turning around before the bend. Again, I turn and run from the precipice of discovery. I am very disappointed in myself. 

Of course, it is certain that the barn doors would not open for him. The lock is rusted shut. I will never return with a bolt cutter, for if I do, the doors will open to emptiness, rushed disappointment. The barn is my test, I am certain. Next week, I will wear attire appropriate for climbing the snaking vines. I will ask myself, as I turn that bend once more, “Am I afraid? No.” Again. And again. “Am I afraid? No.” Of course it will be true.

⋯

The significance of everything bears a great weight on my heart, for like all else in the unforgiven present, it marks my soul with the hefty touch of incompleteness. 

This morning a strange feeling emerged from deep within and continued to pour out of me as I accumulated awakeness. Even still I feel it on the edges of me. Since, I have thought so little, less than I have in all my memory. And I dreamed of nothing last night, nothing at all—utterly astonishing. Reading back in this journal, I can only describe this feeling as those ants, without bodies or feet. It felt as though their ghosts frolicked and draped contently over the skin of my soul, billowing and buoyant on my breath. Of course, to delve into this sensation took a great deal of courage. But the conclusions that I know are as follows. At last, I feel at ease with her going. My fear of death is dead, and with the fear, the strength to resist it. Of course, I do not feel at ease with myself. It is as though I am pronounced dead, this falling, quivering lightness. The knots are all gone, and I feel freed, and powerless, and weak in their absence. I brought this journal down the gravel road in my jacket’s inside pocket, holding you as I crossed my arms. It was freezing—it still is—but nothing in me will clench against the cold. I am simply cold. Sitting here as I am now, I feel from the base of my tailbone to the roofs of my hair that this barn is all that is left for me, all that is left to me. Seeing that man must have done something, triggered some week-long, life-long buildup. What happened? I do not know, but I am safe to know I never will. I’m very grateful that I write only once a week, for now it feels like the whole of my existence is untied and must flow/. Perhaps it is that the truth of my existence must be captured now, before, well… I knew I need to save this free feeling in front of the barn. I no longer desire and fear to climb the vines, barely tethered to the barn as they so clearly are. It is simply what I will do once I finish writing. I am no longer afraid of what will be found inside, for there is nothing within me to grasp it, nowhere within me to hold it. The sun has finished rising now, and I can see the fog has risen too. Good morning Anna, where ever you are.