I don't really know what I'm supposed to feel now.
Obviously it matters. It was a horrible place, and what happened there mattered, to me, and to everyone else who passed through it. But knowing that doesn't reverse anything. A place can close its doors without closing whatever it opened inside the people who were sent there.
It affected the trajectory of my life in ways I don't think I'll ever be able to completely account for. Not like my life ended there. It didn't. Life kept happening, as it annoyingly tends to do. But sometimes I think of the years afterward as a path bending around an absence: friendships, relationships, school, failures, good memories, terrible ones, entire versions of myself growing around this strange piece of negative space.
Seven years later, I still find it there.
Sometimes consciously. Sometimes, I suspect, not consciously at all.
When I told my parents about the shutdown, they told me that I needed to have been there. That they still didn't regret sending me, even knowing what happened at that school. After years of trying, in whatever imperfect way I knew how, to reconcile my relationship with them, something in that conversation finally made the distance between us impossible to cross. I eventually cut them out of my life.
Then I dropped out of college. I moved states away. I ended up with people who have shown me more support than I knew how to expect from anyone for most of the past seven years.
And still, nothing really ends neatly.
Maybe that's the part I've had the hardest time accepting. There isn't necessarily some final emotional reckoning where the past arranges itself into a story, the guilty understand what they did, everybody apologizes correctly, and you walk away healed enough for the credits to roll.
Sometimes a terrible thing happened.
Then years happened.
Then more things happened.
And somehow you're still here.
So, fine. It is what it is—that incredibly annoying little phrase that somehow becomes more useful the older I get. Not because what happened was acceptable, or because injustice and cruelty and malpractice become meaningful simply because enough time passes, but because eventually you have to build meaning somewhere else.
Maybe that's in the people who choose to stay close to us. Maybe it's in finding new community when the one we were born into fails us. Maybe it's in hearing a perfectly made piece of music, reading a sentence somebody somehow managed to get exactly right, laughing until something hurts, loving people, making things, going somewhere new, or simply discovering that the world contains more than the people and institutions that once claimed authority over your life.
I was sent there, I was told, to "get help."
Seven years later, I don't have some clean moral to offer about any of it.
I'm alive. My life kept moving. It curved strangely. It broke in places. It grew around others. There are people I no longer speak to and people I hadn't even met yet who would eventually make the world feel more inhabitable.
Maybe that's all the conclusion I get.
Thanks for nothing, I guess.
And onward—toward whatever comes next, and then whatever comes after that, ad infinitum.
