Picnic Area #17 or, The Horror of Home

When you have been a strange child, nostalgia is a double edged sword. Walking through the park where you once spent so many hours is fraught with emotion. It's all fine one moment, recalling this bend of the road, the gravel beneath the swings, the water fountain where your hot and tired classmates lined up for a drink. Everything smells the same - the grass, trees and river still have the same sweet scent and you are amazed how much you remember despite having forgotten. When you have been a strange child, though, alongside comes an upwelling of old miseries.

Depression and alienation have effects that are hard to put your finger on. It's not so easy as cataloging a series of events. It means nothing to say. "I felt lonely in this spot" or "the bank of this creek is where I sat crying in despair". These are only expressions of things that happened The real horror is one of perception. Depression is like a wound in the mind

Amid the the sunnier memories, the feel of a nightmare emerges. The dense mat of live oak leaves crunching under my feet makes me nauseous. The webby light coming through the trees feels prickly. There is a yawning horror somewhere that I can't name, only sense its presence. It's here though, and comes back to haunt me in vague, uninterpretable dreams.

I had forgotten about picnic area 17. Reservations Only. It's always been there under the trailing oak branches, despite my forgetting. Snippets of far-off memory emerge - my sister's friends hoping to hide from prying eyes. My schoolmates in our Kindermaskenball costumes playing and clinging to branches like little monkeys in fancy dress, or sharing sodas with other girls whose names have been lost to me. It hardly matters. These are all just descriptions of things that happened. I had forgotten all of that long before yesterday as I was making my way to the springs, when suddenly it was there in front of me. The light coming through the branches was as it had always been, catching me in its sickening web.

There is no reason I can give, only that the wound in my mind makes it so.