There is a barn in your backyard.  There are no animals inside, no hay.  The boards are all wayward, shedding splinters that sun and wind and time have worn down and tugged free.

                It feels like there are windows everywhere.  With the door shut behind you, you get the feeling that you are inside the stars or something, light shooting onto your skin from tiny holes in so many directions.  The real windows have all been boarded up, or maybe there weren’t real ones to begin with.  Anyway, the usual places in the middle of rectangular walls are dark, unremarkable.  They are empty space on the map, behind the compass.

                But whoever built this barn was neither a carpenter nor an architect.  You imagine someone slung these slopshod boards around as easily as a slickly emptying bottle of beer.  Like a child’s blocks.  Like a perennial child’s blocks.  Closing the left eye so the right might speak truer about which  bit of lumber might properly block which bit of outside air.

                Over time, the barn has settled.  But over time, it has stayed standing.  The ground below it has sighed and strained.  The iron of nail has tugged loose wood downward at angles that are only combated by length and gauge.

                And so many little hands of so many little children, innocently hoping that if they got a peek at what you keep in there, they’d be able to grow up a little bit faster.

                What do you keep in there?

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There is a barn in my backyard.

                No one has seen the inside but me, and even I’ve spent less minutes inside than would make up even a single day.

                I am afraid of the dark.  There are no windows in my barn, but there’s no electricity and I haven’t installed hooks to hang lamps or tables upon which to place candles, because maybe out here I’m more afraid of the light.

                If you walked into my barn, which you couldn’t without my key, you’d see a dirt floor, packed hard by the feet of the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in my house before me.  Their weight on this earth, a steady foundation, is all that they’ve left behind.

                There is no furniture, no chairs to sit in.  To get comfortable in here, I’d have to lay down against the cold, quiet dust.  And I already said, I’m afraid of the dark.

                The room is square, but the wall farthest from the door recedes to impossibility in the dimness.  I’ve never been brave enough to walk far enough in to see it.

                The other three walls are lined with shelves that stretch up into the tired rafters.  They are identical and naturally antique.  Utilitarian.  There is nothing above save for the sagging wood.

                The shelves are lined with things that I recognize, but I can’t remember tucking into these cobwebbed shadows.  That’s what’s so terrifying about being out here.  How did all of these things get here if it wasn’t by my commanded hand?

                On my left, or everywhere really, there are stacks of books with no jackets, their covers worn so that if they had titles, they’d be lost.  My handwriting litters the margins.  Lines that made me remember and hurt, or dream and smile, or just shake my head in disbelief or jealousy are all highlighted with craggy underlines.

                These are books about my life.

                Here’s where I was so proud I felt explosive, and wanted to hold everyone’s hand so I did it at least to my mom and to him and to her.

                Here’s where I was unbearably envious of the happiness of one of my dearest friends.  Here’s where that hurt me so deep in my stomach that I didn’t eat dinner or breakfast or lunch or anything.

                Here’s where I was lazy.

                Here’s where I was in love.

                Here’s where I was denied pleasure and here’s where I denied it.

                Here are the 20,000 times I lied to my parents.  Here are the times I wasn’t sorry.

                Here’s where someone gave me advice.  Here’s where I didn’t take it, and where I did.

                I come out here clutching whatever pen I can find and pick out one of these books and I start marking it up.  I get so rushed and panicked that my writing is nearly illegible sometimes but I have to keep doing it because there is so much to say about these things I read.

                I read through, over and over, what I’ve done, said, felt, seen, and I remember and relate.  I am useless, as a stranger reading some borrowed fiction, to help my heroine self avoid the trap, save the day, learn the lesson, use my brain as much as I know I should.  It’s excruciating, reading the gory details, or lovely ones, of what I’m about to put myself through, but I do it.

                I come out here looking for the book about my future, but I never find it.  I only get sucked into the narration of my past.

                When the sun goes down, my eyes start to ache with strain.  I put the book back, lock it in the barn, and walk back to the house.  I put the key in a drawer that no one else can find, and I keep living.