April Assignment - Untitled

The Old Mill is where we forged our history.

The mill existed in a dilapidated nether-world where decay was ever present but never progressed. The crumbling walls looked sufficiently sturdy, but no one ever went upstairs to test their fortitude. Inside it was dark and gray, even under harsh afternoon sunlight. The mill was abandoned long before any of us were born. We investigated county records one damp spring day, but we could not find a deed for that tract of land. So it was simply The Old Mill.

We found the mill so long ago. We were just children romping through the woods in the springtime. There were four of us in the beginning: Greg, Erich, Mary and myself but in The Old Mill we shed these facades. Others joined us through the years but enlistment was selective.

In the basement we gathered in the wine cellar, but it could just as easily have been a dungeon. Rusted fixtures adorned the walls and we hung a couple gas lanterns on the medieval decor. From the woods we dragged the biggest stumps and logs our little arms could grasp, and we pushed an overbuilt table from the kitchen to the cellar.

As kids, we found The Old Mill could become everything our imaginations wished. We traveled the world, walked on the moon, ran through time fighting dinosaurs and sabre tooth tigers and Roman gladiators and knights and Indians and the Germans. We would turn down the lanterns and try to scare ourselves with stories of ghosts and haunted houses.

As teenagers, The Old Mill satiated our lust to sample nefarious vices. We became smugglers of another time. We scavenged dumpsters and alley-ways for thrown out furniture. We hauled an absurd congregate of threadbare vintage effects from miles away to pile in the wine cellar. It was a way of moving up in the world. We carved out a style we called our own to decorate our apartment in the woods. We smoked cigarettes and marijuana, poured cheep beer and vodka, and developed a taste for scotch and whiskey that never left me. We tried to figure out what it all meant and why life goes on. Why do our parents and teachers want us to do what everyone else does and be normal and go with the flow? Where does the identity of the individual go? It gets lost and crushed amidst a gray life of algebra, PE, and puberty, we decided. Well that's not gonna be me, we declared.

And then we all packed up the van and left for college to find ourselves. Again.

We returned to The Old Mill as college students whenever people were home on breaks. Now we reminisced about our childhood and reckless high school adventures. We debated everything we thought really knew about the real world and just how everything works.

And it works like this: We all grow up and find something within ourselves that drives us to do something in life – big, small; virtuous, immoral; it doesn't matter what – but we never really change who we were when we lay with all the other newborns in the hospital. And there is something that connects certain people to one another in unexplainable ways and no matter where those individuals are in this world, they are never really apart. And that is the breath of life. Till death do us part, indeed.

The Old Mill still stands. In fact, nothing has really changed. The bricks are just as gray and dilapidated as they once were. Maybe the grass has grown a bit taller. My old bones don't move as fast as they once did, but they got me through the woods and I'm sure I can make it inside and down the worn stone steps to the cellar.

It took a long time to get down to the wine cellar, but when you're as old as I am that doesn't really matter. My friends are long gone. Either mentally or physically, I've long since forgotten what fate befell whom. The furniture we brought here those many years ago is still here and more or less intact. One of our lanterns still hangs on the wall. The chairs probably aren't as comfortable as they once were, but after a long hike through the woods, it feels good to sit.

I wish that I could have my ashes spread in this room. I feel more at home here than I have anywhere else. But I couldn't give any sort of directions that someone might even find this place. I can only find my way on instinct, and I can't do that very well if I'm dead.

I'm going to let my mind drift back to my youth when The Old Mill was filled with stories and laughter and hope and camaraderie. I have nowhere to go, and I'm quite at peace. My soul is weary, so I think I'll rest awhile.