I was convinced I would never find this place again. I was convinced it wasn’t real.

I wish I had been right.

When I was seven, my parents and I went to the mall on a Sunday afternoon. It was a large mall with a huge open space in the middle – a large circle with benches, tables, and a small stage. The mall would use that space for displays from time to time; that’s where Santa would go, for example, but the time I remember was different.

When we went there that afternoon, there was a jungle gym in the open area. The signs advertised that the entire playground set was made from recycled material, and my dad let me explore for a few minutes while my mom went off into a store. I climbed through an opening, went around a bend, and found myself on a small overlook. My dad had followed my progress and was waving from the floor, which was maybe six feet below.

The story ends somewhat uneventfully. I got scared and couldn’t convince myself to climb back down, so my dad had to unhook a piece of the overlook and pick me up. He set me on the ground, fixed the equipment, and told me it was okay that I was scared. It was one of the most important moments in my life to that point, because it was the first time I can remember trusting my father unconditionally.

The problem is that it never happened.

I’ve tried hundreds of times now to get my parents to remember that day. I can still see the entire playground vividly in my mind, with brown bars intercrossing and large green suspension poles keeping the entire playground upright. I could draw a picture for you right now.

But it isn’t real. My parents insist that we never went to that mall when I was young, and they have to be right. My brother would have been three years old at the time, but he isn’t with us in my memory. He would have been there. Clearly, this entire scenario was a byproduct from an odd childhood dream, or a converted picture from a long-forgotten book. It exists only in my mind.

This isn’t the only time that has happened though. Or so I thought.

About a year after this fictional trip to the mall happened in my mind, I remember another trip with my mother. It was summer, and my childhood best friend, David, was at our house for the day. My mother had to deliver a contract for a business – she was working for an attorney at the time – and we weren’t quite old enough to stay by ourselves.

We eventually wound our way through a residential neighborhood in a town nearby, and then made a turn onto a gravel road. After a few moments, the road ended, my mom exited the car, walked toward a trailer sitting at the far edge of the lot by the forest, and David and I didn’t even look up from our books.

A few minutes later, she returned with bad news; it was going to take a little while to sort out a few issues. She suggested we get out of the car and explore the grounds, with the promise that we would stay close. David and I happily agreed and stepped out of the car, taking in our surroundings for the first time.

That was the first time I saw the Enchanted Forest.

Greeting us was a kingdom. There was no other way to describe what I could see. High white walls lined the edges of the gravel parking lot, lined with flags and shields. The walls met in the middle, surrounding a massive white castle with red turrets. A golden Rapunzel stood on a small balcony overlooking the castle, her braids flowing to the ground. Finally, our eyes were drawn to the gateway, where two heavy wooden doors stood open.

We wandered toward the doors and through the castle entrance. The doors were heavy and wooden, painted blue but with elaborate brown trim that crisscrossed each door with an X. Through a small foyer was the other end of the castle, and… something.

It was as if someone had designed a magical world, taken the time and effort to perfect every detail, and then died that day. Greeting our eyes were enormous specimens from every fairy tale, looming over our small frames and extending as far as the eye could see. The first one to draw me in was a Mother Goose; she stood at least five times my height, with a protruding white neck and a bonnet that had long peeled away most of its original pink paint.

As young boys with little fear are prone to do, we wandered deeper. We peeked into an old replica of the Gingerbread House, covered by blue tarps and ice cream-shaped shingles, but quickly left when we came across a maggot-covered raccoon carcass. We passed a shoe-shaped house, painted a startling purple but now marred with streaks of red, and opted not to approach any further. Every turn on the path brought a new fairy tale land, dilapidated and clearly having received no attention in decades.

At this point, I finally voiced what I had been feeling for a few minute: we should go back. It had been several minutes already, and my mother surely did not intend for us to go beyond the castle. David insisted we follow the path around the next hill, and then we could go back. I agreed.

That was a mistake.

Around the next hill was the end of the park; the white walls emerged again and the path stopped at the entrance to a brown wooden shed. Nailed to the side was an old sign with faint lettering.

“Robin Hood’s Barn. Gift Shop.”

The door had a padlock on one side, and I was ready to go home. The sun had slowly begun to set, and I was hoping to hear my mother’s voice at any moment, scolding us for traveling this far.

“Well,” I said timidly, trying to sound normal but with a quiver in my voice that quickly betrayed my anxiety, “we can’t go in there. We need to go back.”

David looked for a moment like he would go along with my suggestion, but then he smiled. Without saying a word, he put his foot against the other side of the door, near the middle hinge, and leaned forward.

As he did this, I looked away, and my eyes again found the sign next to the door. The letters were faded, and the focus it took to read them caused me to miss something. Just beneath the neatly printed sign was another line, neatly written but unmistakably done by someone else. It looked as if it was once red, but time and weather had blended the color with the wooden sign. The message was simple, neatly capitalized and punctuated.

“Here lies Marian.”

My gaze turned back to the door as I heard the sound of old wood giving way; an initial snapping noise, followed by creaking as the hinges separated from the side of the wooden shed. The door flung open and crashed down at an angle, held upright only by the padlock on the other side. It blocked all but a small sliver of the doorway, large enough for a young boy to slip through.

Without hesitation, David wedged himself into the small opening and past the still-swaying door. After a moment of quiet, I made the decision to follow him.

The shed looked exactly the same as every other building we had seen so far that day. Well, almost the same. The walls were crumbling, graffiti covered every inch of the inside, and sun poured in through holes in the ceiling. The difference was on the floor.

Every other place we had seen so far was covered in debris – old wall fragments, leftover trinkets and garbage, and leaves and branches from the outside that had been blown in over the years. This place was different. The floor was completely clear – just a series of rotting wooden planks, arranged in a repeating, diagonal L pattern across the rectangular surface.

Except for one thing. On the other end of the shed, near the back wall, was a small box. Actually, as we got closer (with me following at least two steps behind David) we saw more clearly that it was an old VHS case.

An old, well-worn but still clearly identifiable, VHS case for Disney’s Robin Hood.

I had to laugh. We had come all the way down this path, smashed our way into an abandoned shed, and found the one remaining piece of merchandise from some twisted theme park that had long since been forsaken. David reached down and picked up the VHS case, shook it, and handed it to me. It was light and clearly empty. David walked to where the case had been and started to examine the wall.

I started to turn over the case, and noticed there was something taped to the back. All I saw was the edge of a small, square paper.

And then a hand grabbed my shoulder.

I froze – completely, utterly paralyzed. I couldn’t react, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think. I could still see David facing the wall, completely oblivious to what was happening behind him. Finally, after a few moments I turned my head around.

My mother was standing behind me, expressionless, her hand gripping my shoulder. I met her eyes for a moment, and her gaze was sharp. But it wasn’t angry, or even fearful; the only way I could think to describe her in that moment would be to say she was consumed with an expression of pleading anguish. She did not speak, and yet every white fold of her eyes radiated with energy.

Without warning, she became my mother again. “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?” she screamed, causing both David and I to jump and scramble back through the entrance to the shed. The sun was much lower overhead; we had been wandering down the path for hours.

We marched back to the main entrance, visible from a distance by the red turrets that contrasted with the surrounding forest. The entire way, my mother told us how she was about to call the police, how we could have been seriously injured, and how we had betrayed her trust by going so far into the park. All we could do was apologize and try not to stare at the shadows starting to protrude from the base of each fairy tale character that we passed on our way.

We got back to the car and sat in silence as my mother drove us home. After a few minutes, she turned on the radio. I glanced at the clock as she fiddled with the dial: 3:46pm. For some reason I can remember the exact date too: August 6, 1997. A Korean airliner crashed in Guam that day, and the afternoon radio hosts discussed the circumstances at length.

We finally returned home and offered our final round of apologies and pleas for mercy. My mother gave us no response, but when David’s father arrived to pick him up, she made no mention of our adventure.

She never mentioned it to me again either.

I suppressed the memory from my mind for years as well. It was summer, so the remaining days before school resumed were filled with trips to our neighborhood pool and family vacations to our grandparents’ home in Chicago. As vivid and unique as that day was, it quickly slipped from my eight-year-old mind.

Several years later, however, the memory resurfaced. Initially it came back in the form of the castle, as the sight of a white castle in a film prompted my mind to remember the vast walls and turrets from the beginning of my adventure. A children’s’ book I was tasked with reading to my nephew had an image of Mother Goose, and I remembered the first panorama from when we crossed through the castle foyer.

I brought it up to my mother one day, out of curiosity – did she remember this bizarre place where David and I got lost? She looked at me, furrowed her brow, and responded that she didn’t have a clue what I meant. I let it go.

As the details from that day returned in more clarity, I asked her again about that place; what was it, and how in the world did it end up in such a state of disrepair? Each time I mentioned it, she would pause to think, but come up with nothing.

Even more years passed, and I again let the visions from that day return to the archives of my mind. I worked my way through college without a thought of the bizarre fairy tale land, until my final semester.

During my final semester, I had to take a course that met a requirement for linguistic diversity. In an extreme fit of senioritis, I failed to even consider this requirement until days before the semester began. The only course remaining was a semester-long seminar entitled “The Myth and Legend of Robin Hood.”

I slipped into the class that Wednesday morning, barely awake after an evening with friends the night before, and grabbed a seat at the back. The professor, a middle-aged woman with large glasses and long, silver hair, was just launching a slide show, and I began to prepare myself for seventy minutes of hell.

“Good morning,” she said, waiting for a response from the class that wasn’t coming. “I’m Professor Fitzwalter.”

“You can call me Professor, or you can call me Mirian.”

I sat bolt upright in my chair, and the textbook slipped off my knee and landed with a dull thud on the carpeted floor. I reached down, swearing under my breath, picked up the book, and directed my gaze back toward the front of the room.

She was looking right at me. Her expression was blank, but her eyes – there was no other way to describe them except to say I had seen that look only one time before. Her gaze bore the same sharp, pleading anguish that I had seen on my mother’s face. It was unmistakable.

My moment ended as quickly as it had begun; she turned away, walked to the other side of the room, and began to discuss the syllabus. I left at the first break and joined a waitlist for another course to fulfill my graduation requirement. I never went back.

As they tend to do, the years again passed by. I didn’t sleep much the night after that class, but the pursuits of graduation and greater things quickly allowed me to convince myself I had imagined the encounter. I neglected to withdraw properly from the class and took a “W,” but it was a small price to pay for never reliving that encounter. I mentioned the castle to my mother one last time, careful to describe only the entrance and nothing beyond the walls, but she again pled ignorance.

Just like when I had to be rescued from the overlook, I must have imagined that day.

I did searches occasionally; combining phrases like “castle” and “fairy tale land” with my home state. There was nothing. I could not find a single mention of this bizarre place that existed so vividly in my mind.

And then it happened.

I was on Facebook, of all places. It was a lazy fall evening, last year, and I was wasting away time before my brain decided to allow me to sleep. I scrolled through my feed, barely even registering the photos and words that crossed the screen. That is, until I saw the red turret.

I hadn’t even scrolled far enough to expose half of the photograph, but I didn’t need that much to know what I had found. The red turret was unmistakable, with Rapunzel still standing on her balcony, hair flowing to the gravel lot below her.

It was an article from a local arts paper, about a piece of land that had been condemned. A developer had purchased the entire property, and was going to put luxury condos on the site. The land was home for many years to a theme park; a fairy tale immersion land for children.

The Enchanted Forest.

I sat bolt upright and could feel my heart pounding in my chest. Sure, I had thought about that place before, but that was in my mind. To see a picture, well, that was just different. I looked to the top right-hand corner of my screen: 10:42pm. Good enough. If my mother had gone to bed, she was just going to have to wake up.

She answered her phone on the second ring; I could hear baseball in the background and the sounds of my father and brother playfully arguing about a decision the manager had made. She walked out of the room, muttering and laughing about their noise level, and asked me why I called.

“Mom, I found it. I found the castle.”

There was a pause, and then she laughed again.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

I stumbled over my words, trying to explain myself as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

“The castle, mom. The white one, with the red turrets and the creepy fairy tale houses, that I’ve asked you about a bunch of times. It’s real. It’s called the Enchanted Forest, and it’s in Mayville. A friend of mine posted an article on Facebook about how they’re tearing the whole place down to build condos.”

There was another pause, this one a few seconds longer than the first. Finally, she responded.

“Sweetheart, I don’t think you ever went there. If we had been there, I would have remembered.”

I couldn’t handle this any longer. I had to bring up what happened.

“Mom, you found David and I in one of the buildings. You yelled at us the entire way back. I know it happened.”

There was a third pause, this one for only a moment before noise exploded from the other room. Our favorite baseball team had hit a home run, and my father and brother were exuberantly shouting over one another, both claiming credit for predicting the outcome.

My mother made a noise of mild disapproval, and returned to our conversation. “I’m not sure what to say,” she said, with her voice trailing off. “I think you’ve just got a really creative mind. It sounds like an incredible story.”

I was incredulous. I had never been this sure of anything in my entire life. I said goodnight and hung up the phone, but there was no sleeping after that exchange. It didn’t make any sense.

I returned to my computer and tabbed back to the article, scrolling through the text to the final paragraph.

“The Enchanted Forest is located at 546 Nottingham Forest Road, Mayville, KY. The condominium owner anticipates the land will be cleared within 60 days, and construction will begin next spring.”

There it was. My answers. After all these years, I found an address. This was a real place, barely a half-hour drive from my home, where I could go and prove to my mother that it wasn’t something I had imagined.

There was no chance in fucking hell I was going anywhere near there.

A week later, I was invited to a birthday party for an acquaintance. A mutual friend insisted I come along; she swore it was at this wonderful tavern with perfectly balanced kegs and an immaculately curated playlist. It was either this or another night at home, so I dutifully tagged along.

As the party wound down, one member of the party was clearly not fit to drive. The shot girls roaming the bar were very persuasive, and I only demurred because of an early shift the next morning. Most of the others were accompanying the guest of honor back to his home for further drinks, so I offered to give him a ride home.

His house was in a small residential neighborhood, with a winding main road and small cul-de-sacs scattered every several hundred yards. I watched him stumble up to the porch, finally succeeding with the key on the sixth or seventh attempt, and pulled out of his circle and back toward home.

My mind had a general sense of where the main road was, so I made a left when it presented itself and flipped on my high beams. In my tiny Saturn the effect was minimal, but the road was worn and curvy, so I welcomed the small patches of light that exposed the road ahead.

Until I saw a turret.

I slammed on my brakes in shock, but the road was slippery from an earlier downpour. My poor Saturn hydroplaned for several yards, and I overcorrected and slid toward the next turn. The car finally recovered, resting at about a 70-degree angle perpendicular to the road.

Ahead of me was an unlit, unkempt gravel path. Barely visible in the distance, above the trees and silhouetted by the remnants of my headlights, was a single, red turret. As my vision adjusted, I could make out two golden eyes hovering next to the turret. Rapunzel’s gaze met mine, unblinking and unchanged from so many years before.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” How in the world had I ended up here? I glanced at my car’s clock: 1:17am.

I have no idea what came over me at that moment. I was completely, totally engulfed with fear. My entire body was shaking, covered in goosebumps, and my mind was consumed with the feeling that I had been dropped into a pit of rapidly moving insects. I could barely remember to breathe.

But I put my car in drive, and I started slowly down the gravel path.

The road was shorter than I remembered. Within moments, the entire castle emerged, exposed from the blackness by my feeble headlights. It was much smaller than I remembered, but that came as no surprise. Eight-year-old me had equal parts imagination and lack of perspective. I put the car in park facing toward the main entrance, grabbed my phone from the center console, and stepped out into the lot.

I reached for my phone and took a few photos; I would need proof for when my mom invariably denied this place had ever existed. I walked back around to my trunk and retrieved my black, metal flashlight; it was a gift from my father for graduation that had proven useful over the years. My brain screamed at me to get back in the car and leave, but I didn’t.

I walked to the front gate, pulled on the handle, and it opened.

At this point, I was committed. I walked through the empty foyer, still able to see from the lights of my car. Just like the exterior, it looked exactly the same. Debris littered the floor, graffiti covered the walls, and a rat scurried away as my noise carried down toward the wall. I walked through the other side, stepped into the park itself, and clicked on my flashlight.

Suddenly, I was eight again. Mother Goose stared back at me, her bonnet now entirely devoid of pink paint. One of her eyes was black, and there was a streak of red running down her left side. But there she was, exactly as I remembered her from so many years before.

The path was the same too; more overgrown, but it took me past each landmark that David and I had explored. The roof of the Gingerbread House had collapsed, and the landing dock for the moat was now floating in a pond of rainwater and garbage. The purple shoe had fallen on its side, revealing a large set of gears on the bottom that had powered animatronic movement many decades earlier.

It was oddly peaceful being there. I walked slowly down the path, stopping to take photos of familiar locations. I hadn’t spoken to David in many years, but I considered sending him a photo at that moment just to scare him, from one old friend to another. Instead, I continued through the park, my fear slowly fading as I accepted the absurdity of the entire situation.

I was lost in thought for a few moments, walking around another bend with the destination blocked by a hill, when I finally realized where I was. I stopped, but too late: my flashlight beam shone forward and illuminated a brown shed. A sign lay in front of the entrance, having clearly fallen from its original hanging place. Even from several yards away, I could still see the first lines. “Robin Hood’s Barn.”

I turned around. The castle was far from view, but I could just make out the lights of my car, creeping through a small opening between two trees. It was time to go home.

But I couldn’t. I could not come this far and not get my answer. I had to go in there.

It took several moments to convince myself to start walking. Eventually, I overcompensated and lurched forward at a rapid pace, reaching the entrance to the shed at almost a jog.

The door was the same as I had left it. It hung from a rusted padlock, wooden beams rotting but still strong enough to keep the door from falling completely to the ground. I pushed it a few inches toward the wall to make enough room for my adult body to slip through, and after a few deep breaths I used my flashlight to look inside the shed.

The floor was spotless.

The wooden flooring showed even more signs of age and decay, and there were many more missing panels than when I had been here as a child. But just as before, there was no debris, no garbage, no sign of the outside despite holes in the ceiling and a door hanging by a thread.

Well, it wasn’t completely spotless. There was a VHS box resting on the ground near the back wall.

I crossed the shed in four quick paces, overcome with a bizarre mixture of terror and supreme confidence. It was a case for Disney’s Robin Hood, and it was light – clearly empty, as it had been before. I opened the case to be certain, and there was nothing inside.

I almost left at that moment. I had come so close, wandered down an abandoned garden of horrors to get to this point, and I was inches away from tossing the case to the floor and running toward the lights of my car.

I wish I had.

Instead, I turned the case over. As I turned the case, I saw the square of paper still taped to the back. The bottom portion moved slightly with the wind, as that part of the tape had separated from the case. As I turned the case, a gleam of light came back at me; it was the reflection from the glossy covering on the square of paper.

It wasn’t paper. It was a photograph.

It was a square, developed Polaroid – the kind with the date imprinted in the lower right corner. I peered closely at the photograph, trying to discern what I was looking at. All I could make out were three people, all with their backs turned to the camera.

And then it clicked. A women’s back was in the foreground, just feet from the perspective of the cameraperson. She was an adult with strong shoulders, and her hand was on the shoulder of a child standing in front of her and to her right.

It was a photograph of my mother. Standing in this shed.

The photograph was my mother, with her hand on my shoulder. David’s back was out of focus but clearly visible beyond my head. There was no doubt in my mind exactly what that photograph showed. I squinted at the date, imprinted automatically on the white border below the edge of the photograph.

“08-07-1997 15:21:06”

August 6th. 1997. I knew that date.

I dropped the VHS case and let it fall back to the floor. I turned, half-expecting to see my mother staring back at me, but the shed was empty. I walked quickly toward the entrance, finally ready to go home. I had an answer, and I didn’t want any more.

As I stepped through the entrance, my foot caught on a piece of wood and I smashed to the ground. My flashlight fell from my hand and landed a few feet away, pointing back toward where I had fallen.

It was the sign. It had shifted when I moved the door, and was now sitting in front of the entranceway. I felt blood start to creep down my leg, so I reached for my flashlight and climbed to my feet.

As I did so, the flashlight’s beam stayed on the sign. “Robin Hood’s Barn. Gift Shop” was visible in faded lettering, just as it had been before.

Right below that lettering, in neat print, was another line.

“She may never rest.”

I ran. I grabbed my flashlight and tore back down the path, breathing heavily and barely staying on my feet around each turn. My headlights got closer and finally came into view through the entrance of the castle. My door was open as I had left it, and I hurled myself into the driver’s seat to close the door and lock out anyone who might want to send another message.

I threw my car in park and swung the wheel to the left, turning back toward the gravel entrance. My high beams were still shining, and as my car shifted they illuminated the surrounding forest and the high grass that had grown and overtaken the sides of the lot from years of neglect.

As my car turned toward my escape, I was suddenly blinded by a gleam coming from that very high grass. Something was shining back at me. It took a moment for me to realize there was a structure, mostly hidden by the grass. I clicked off my high beams, and was able to glimpse the side of an old, abandoned trailer.

The metal sides gleamed from my lights, and I realized what I was looking at. This was the manager’s trailer, where my mom had gone to deliver paperwork the last time I had been in this lot.

I guided my car the rest of the way toward the gravel road, and put her in park once again. I couldn’t leave without at least looking at the trailer. My entire body and mind were screaming at me to leave, and yet I knew that I would just come back another night if I didn’t look now.

I grabbed my flashlight from the passenger’s seat, switched it back on, and stepped out of my car one more time.

The trailer was almost completely engulfed by the grass; the wooden stairs leading to the front door had long since given way. The door was bolted shut by a massive padlock, much larger than the one on the shed inside the park. I pulled on the door in a few places, but it was secure; there was no getting in the trailer.

As a last ditch effort, I used my flashlight to try and see inside. The blinds on the inside of the window were mostly drawn, but near the bottom there were two that had been turned enough to expose a small opening. I held the flashlight against the window, closed one eye, and peered inside.

Across the trailer I could see a gray metal desk, matching the décor of the trailer itself, with papers strewn about. There was a paperweight near the front, and I could just make out the legs of an office chair, resting on its side to the right of the desk. After a few more moments of probing every corner I could find, I started to pull my gaze away and return to my car.

As I moved away, I spotted the paperweight again. It was long and slender, with a golden base and lettering on the front. I pressed the flashlight against the window again and stared through the small opening, shifting the beam to reduce the glare in an attempt to read the lettering. As my eye began to focus, the writing came in view slowly, but eventually unmistakable.

“Mirian Fitzwalter”

That was enough. I ran back to my car, pulled onto the gravel path, and quickly found myself back on the winding road through that neighborhood where I had dropped off the drunken partygoer. I followed the road for several minutes before finding a cross-section that I recognized, and merged onto the highway in the direction of home.

Several minutes of silence later, I turned the key to my front door. I quickly turned on all the lights and opened a beer. I opened my computer, tabbed to my browser, and let out a quick “fuck.” The browser was still open to the photo of the castle from the article I had seen.

I closed the article and tried to resolve myself to go to bed, but there was one last answer I needed to find. I looked back through my bookmarks and found my old college portal, where I used to register for classes. It took a few tries, but I remembered my password and successfully logged in.

I navigated through to the class schedule feature, and found the option to search for previous years. There were a few fields you could choose from; I selected “last name” and keyed “Fitzwalter” into the search engine. If it pulled up her email address, I could reach out and maybe find someone else who would believe that the Enchanted Forest was real.

“No results.” That couldn’t be right. I tabbed back, checked the spelling again, and tried another search. Nothing. I tabbed back again and selected “subject” the drop-down menu, and typed “Robin Hood” into the search box.

“No results.” I tabbed back again and looked through my options. I could sort by semester, so I selected the correct year and queried for all results. After a few moments, the system generated a list of every class offered that semester. I scrolled through, reading each entry, searching for a way to reach this professor with whom I had so briefly crossed paths.

She wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, but there was no way to reach here. This class wasn’t in the system.

Then I realized: my transcript. At the very least, I could confirm the details from there and use them to track her down. I opened an old folder on my computer, full of documents I used for job applications after graduation, and opened my transcript.

It wasn’t there. The class wasn’t on my transcript. I searched for her name and for Robin Hood and for every identifying detail I could think about, and I found nothing.

Defeated, I changed out of my day clothes and climbed into bed. I left the lights on in the hall, but I had only a few hours to rest before my morning shift, so I dimmed the lights in my bedroom to encourage my mind to calm down and allow me a brief night of sleep.

It was as I started to drift, that I finally realized what I had missed.

It never happened. The class never happened. I clenched my eyes shut and tried to summon my memory from that day, to try and remember the details from that brief encounter. It took several minutes, but finally I could see myself walking into that room, slumping in an uncomfortable desk at the back of the sloped lecture hall.

I dropped my book, swore, and looked up.

Into the eyes of my mother.

I was convinced it was real. It wasn’t.

They found her dead in her bed the next morning.

I've had a lot of gaps on this page - days, weeks, years - but nothing quite like this one. The last time I published something here was back in the fall of 2014, when I couldn't help but take time to appreciate 10 years on this site. Now it's almost 12.

I graduate from law school in less than 48 hours. That sentence cannot even begin to convey the whirlwind of feelings and emotions and general confusion I have right now, wondering how or where or what happened to make any of this possible. I cannot pretend to understand how this is even possible, and I would be lying if I said I always believed it would happen.

This was originally intended to be a long entry, but I don't think I have the emotional energy tonight. I'd like to take the time for a long, rambling walk down my mock trial career and the chaos of the last three years, but I think I'm going to need some separation first.

For now, it's time to just enjoy the next two days and then buckle down for the bar. I'm excited for the next sunrise.

Certain things in life have a way of sneaking up on you. I knew in the back of my mind that I started this blog around fall of 2004, but I didn't notice until I wrote my last entry about Jupiter that the 10 year anniversary (if it really deserves that term) was so close. Turns out that anniversary is today. I made my first entry on Xanga at 8:03pm on October 26th, 2004.

I've looked back at that entry several times before, but tonight I'm thinking a little heavier, trying to remember some specific details about what was going on in my life at that point. One great example is in the text of my first entry itself, where I made reference to my high school Christian punk rock band, Solitary Imperfection. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here's what our website looked like on October 28th of 2004. Believe it or not, I used to run a Xanga site for SI that was pretty popular. Back in 2004 when we were playing our first shows with that band, there really was no other social network site that everyone used. I wish I could link to that page, but the Xanga server migration made it no more. I would use it then in the same way I use Facebook now for my current band - set lists, show announcements, and interacting with "fans" (to use the term extremely loosely).

Fall of 2004 was my sophomore year of high school. I was barely months away from seeing my GPA fall below the academic minimum to participate in extracurriculars, forcing me to drop out of Mock Trial just after earning a starting attorney spot. That sent me into a pretty nasty spell of depression and self-loathing that is well documented on here, partially in posts that you can read and in a few private entries that I have for my own memory. I was 15 years old, just barely competent enough on the guitar to hold together our literal band of misfits when we would play shows. I found solace most nights in what I would still say was a well-stocked buddy list full of friends and acquaintances from church, choir and SUMMIT. I was a passionate John Kerry supporter with multiple bumper stickers and pins on my books and bag, and Joan of Arcadia occupied my Friday nights on a regular basis. (Just so we're clear, even 10 years later - fuck you CBS for canceling that show).

I think we have this tendency as a population now to be embarrassed by our youth. One of the reasons I love this blog and all the words it holds is that it gives me the opportunity to be proud not just of who I've become but who I've been. (or Ben. Heh). Was I an obnoxious, dramatic, self-centered little snot at 15? Hell yeah I was. (Some out there might argue that not much has changed). But I was also a kid, and there's nothing wrong with looking back and laughing at some of my dramatic posts or angry private rants. Each one of those entries represents a moment that I had the opportunity to experience, for better or worse, and seeing them gives me a chance to be thankful for every last one.

The one thing I wish I could link to, more than anything, are the WB Forums that I spent endless hours on, writing and reading Harry Potter fan fiction. I've written extensively about this before, but this time in my life really was dominated by those forums. I still have all of my old (terrible, awful, ridiculously poorly written) stories saved in Word docs, but man do I miss just surfing those forums and reading new posts from members all over the world. It was a simple way to spend an evening, and I loved it. Phoenix had been out for over a year and Prince was still just a mystery without a title, so I spent my evenings perusing hundreds of fellow fans' theories and musings on what was still to come in the final two books.

I'm sitting here on my couch, on October 26th, 2014. I'm a second year law student with a plan in life and clear goals for what I want to do when I graduate. I'm also not afraid to challenge or alter that vision if circumstances present themselves that lead me to do so. To see that growth, from a terrified and uncertain 15 year old to a still sometimes-terrified 25 year old, but with a whole life ahead of me, is pretty amazing. Matt and Lauren were people I barely knew back then, but I'm thankful that today I still consider them among my closest friends. Zach and I hated each other back then; today we live together. Sam was 8, and now he's a college pitcher and an amazing young man. While my puppy didn't quite make it to this 10 year mark, he got pretty damn close. Ten years is a long time, but in a way it almost feels like they happened too fast.

Just for fun, here's what Xanga looked like 10 years ago. Given the recent changes around here, I'd be surprised if I get to do this again in 2024, but hey, a guy can dream. Here's to another 10 years.

When I started this blog, Jupiter was three. I was a sophomore in high school, Zach was still in middle school, and Sam wasn't even ten years old. As young, growing boys, we couldn't have asked for a better soul to share our lives with us than that mutt. He was just the best.

A few nights ago we had the opportunity to be together as a family and say goodbye. It was painful and we all cried, but it also had this sense of completion to it that provided some semblance of comfort. The whole process was handled wonderfully. I came home early last Friday to meet my dad, and we had the chance to take Jupiter to Governor's Bridge Park. Dad and Jup used to spend hours over there when he was younger, running and chasing birds and just being simple. Jupiter didn't have much left in him yesterday, but he limped his way around the path for a while before finally giving it up. We carried him back to the car and took him home, where he got to sit in his bed with the whole family around him. The vet came at 6:30, talked with us for a few minutes, and was endlessly patient. Jupiter was laying on his bed with his head in my dad's lap. The vet gave him a sedative and within five minutes he was sleeping, breathing lightly while we all had a hand on him. He was given the cocktail after the vet shaved a small portion of his front leg to find a vein, and within 30 seconds he quietly stopped breathing. We said our last goodbyes, helped the vet put him in a cadaver bag, and carried the old man out to the car. We'll get the ashes back in about a week.

It's so easy to feel like you've lost a member of the family when you lose a pet, and in a way you actually do. I think for me it felt more like losing a friend. I've talked about this before on here, but I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. I was weird and antisocial, and this didn't exactly help me connect with people. When we first got Jupiter I hadn't even started high school. Middle school was an especially awful time for me - I was bullied and essentially had no close friends - and as silly as it may sound, getting a dog helped with that. It's all been said before, but a dog becomes someone you can trust to just be a dog - they don't care who you are or what you've done, they just want to give love and receive it in return. That was a time in my life where very few people accepted me like that, but our wonderful, kind mutt was one of them.

After Jupiter passed on Friday, we sat around as a family and talked about the good times for a little while. My dad, Zach, Sam and I recalled when we went to go get him. The Bugtongs had gotten a puppy about a week prior - a German Shepherd/Chesapeake Bay Retriever mix named Amber, who was adorable and sweet, and my parents finally gave in to our pleadings and agreed to get one from the same litter. The four of us went there and looked at the puppies who were left, and my dad quickly fell for one they called Lambrick, who was stocky and all black. But Sam walked around a wood pile and saw Big Sable Boy, a brindle puppy with huge hazel eyes and paws that were comically large for his tiny frame. Big Sable Boy followed Sam around the wood pile and the decision was made on the spot. Not even 24 hours later, he was christened Jupiter and given a spot in our home.

So many people have called Jup a gentle giant, and that's the perfect way to encompass his spirit. Those giant paws he had as a puppy never went away, but the rest of his body grew to meet their size. At his full adult size, Jupiter was over 115 pounds and on his hind legs stood almost six feet tall. He was, by all accounts, a really big dog. And yet he was the kindest, sweetest soul you could ever imagine. He never bit a person and even looked guilty when he occasionally snagged an unsuspecting bird in the backyard. He would lay down next to small children and let them tug his ears or his tail without a whimper of protest, and he was the best companion for three young boys who were slowly growing into men.

That being said, he kept the home safe at night for many years, and he knew when my dad was away. There was one night in particular that I remember. Dad was in Jacksonville for a conference so it was just mom and the three of us at home. I turned off the TV around 2am to go to bed, and about 10 minutes later Jupiter sat bolt upright, ran to the back door, and gave a low, deep growl that sounded like he was ready to bite someone's head off. I grabbed a bat, flipped on the backyard lights, and saw the gate open and moving. For whatever reason, someone came in our yard that night, but Jupiter was on high alert and kept his family safe.

I say all that to say this - letting a dog go is unbelievably hard. It was the right thing to do for our old man, and yet I think we all felt some hesitation at the end as we sat around him. But even with all the pain and sadness that came with letting him go, it was worth every bit because of the 13 years, 3 months and 22 days that came before. I got to share the formative years of my young adult life with such a kind and gentle soul, and for that I am forever grateful. Thanks for everything, pup. You were a good dog. The best.

So. It's been a little while.

I don't really even know where to begin. I used to go through these phases where I'd post on here all the time, partially due to the incredible history wrapped up in this blog and partially because I was enjoying the combination of anonymity and oddity that is this place. To be honest, that feeling is gone. Xanga 2.0 is a royal screw-up, and I lost money because I paid for a premium product that now ceases to exist in favor of a new premium product in its place that I also pay to use. I get it, the site was dying and I'll give the admins and creators credit for acknowledging that. But okay, here's an analogy. My band used to work with a booking agency that got us great shows and reasonable time slots, but had the worst social media presence I've ever seen. We stopped using them because we learned not to do pay to play, but it got frustrating sometimes because they didn't do any work to get people out to shows. We were expected to be both full-time musicians and full-time promoters, and that's bullshit. That's what I see with old Xanga. The site's demise was obvious several years ago after the world fled to MySpace. But still to this day the Xanga twitter page or facebook profile are essentially useless. Instead of migrating to new servers and making the old faithful pay to stick around, there could have been a real effort by the people who started this place to keep their own house in order. That didn't happen, and I don't feel nearly as much connection to this blog as I did for the past several years. I'm not writing that to attack anyone, but I figured out recently that it's how I feel. Why did I keep avoiding coming back here to write? Because it's not the same place. It's the ballpark they built on top of where the shitty old one used to be - sure, there's still baseball, but it smells too good.

I've got about a month left in my first year of law school, and I'm going to tell you one thing about the whole experience that I never really anticipated: it's lonely. That's not to say I don't have friends or that I'm not surrounded by wonderful people (because I do and I am) but there's something completely unique about existing in an academic atmosphere with classmates who all know they have to do better than the people sitting around them in order to get the grades they're accustomed to getting all their lives. As someone who almost dropped out of high school, nearly flunked out of community college, and was a lazy student for years before getting my act together, it's not a competitive drive I can completely share (at least in terms of the classwork) but it's always in the air. I said to a close friend that the week of finals you can literally feel the collective tension floating in the hallways. I don't mean that in any figurative sense - it is a different type of oxygen that we breathe during that week, and the only comparison I can make is to how it felt walking from building to building in Estes Park, Colorado. You're breathing, you're pretty sure there's air coming in, but your body sure as hell isn't convinced it's doing any good.

I see it all the time on blogs I follow: don't go to law school. Often times the headlines are accompanied by snide commentary on the state of biglaw and the horrible transgressions that some prominent lawyers have committed in the public forum. Here's a couple of fun realities about that sentiment from someone (me) with firsthand knowledge of what the inside is like. Yes, it's an awful time to get a job in most law-related fields. Yes, the entire graduate school industry is a scam, from the loans and crippling debt to the textbook prices and constant new editions that are magically only available brand new at the university bookstore. (Want to buy used online? Great! You'll have them for week three of class because that's when your loans will process and be available to spend if you don't use the university-provided scuzzball bank, Higher One). That stuff sucks, and it's a constant reality. I'm going to exit law school in just over two years with a J.D. from a barely-top tier school, 100k+ in student loans, a bleak job market, and a shitton of other comparable grads all looking to take the same jobs.

Here's the hope though, and trust me, there's plenty. I don't want to work in biglaw. If you offer me a job in biglaw, I'll turn it down. I want to work with the people that no one will touch. Yeah, that means sometimes they're the people who are criminals, minorities, drug users, homeless, and maligned by rich, racist Republicans as takers or moochers. (Side note on that in a moment). Whether it's working as a public defender, non-profit advocate, or community activist, I want to have my feet on the ground and not under a desk. Desks are for people who need to push papers around, and while that's an incredibly important role in our society (and I truly mean that) I wouldn't be caught dead living my life behind a desk. Hell, I don't even use my own desk that sits in my room with a nice lamp and everything - I'm typing this from my bed, feet away from my desk, because it's where I'd rather be. My hope is rooted in idealism and a passion for equality that my parents made sure I understood at a young age because I may have been born into an upper-middle-class family but that does not give me the right to believe others are below me. In fact, it gives me the responsibility to take my privilege and treat it as something that can be redistributed to the world for the betterment of others. I'm confident I can find a place that will pay me barely enough to live to do work like that, and I can't wait.

Here's that side note about our obsession with "moochers." This whole movement is rooted in the Moral Majority that Reagan put together in the late 70s/early 80s. He manipulated church leaders (because while he was an awful President he was a damn good actor) into joining his coalition and helping him get elected by making sure they would have some sort of influence in government to continue the backlash from the expansion of the social safety net under LBJ and to some extent (although he basically failed at it) Jimmy Carter. This alliance of evangelicals and fiscal hawks eventually lead to the 1994 election landslide, the Contract with America, and so forth, which in turn gave white Christians immense power within the Republican party. That's how we ended up with George W. Bush - the GOP stacked the courts, got a 5 person majority on the Supreme Court, and stole the 2000 election with the most horrific non-slavery decision in the history of that formally-distinguished body. Because of this whole progression, white Christians now think a whole lot of things that aren't true because they were spoon-fed a narrative by rich people who don't actually care about the well-being of the entire country.

If you believe that poor people are all lazy and undeserving of your help, you're not an awful person - you're just horribly uneducated and close-minded. You're also wrong, and both history and scholarly analysis will prove you wrong time and time again. We aren't that far away from a period of time in the history of this country where we sanctioned discrimination at an institutional level. African-Americans were sent to schools that did not have even the slightest ability to help them learn, because they were shams designed to perpetuate the era of slavery that many of these people subconciously believe we were better off never leaving. Think about this: Plessy v. Ferguson stood well into the 1950s - that's when many of these religious leaders were growing up or being born and taught by their parents how they don't owe other people anything.

Remember "you didn't build that?" from the 2012 election? Let me tell you a really simple truth: you didn't build that. If you made a bunch of money in your life, it happened partially because of your hard work and partially because all of our tax dollars went to the police that kept you safe, the government that built the roads and subsidized the airports that transported you and your clients, the IRS who kept you in line but also made sure that other people were playing by the rules as well, and endless other examples of how society helped you become who you are today. Free market capitalism may breed innovation but it also creates a helpless underclass of citizens that are designed to be mocked and scorned as lazy, stupid, ignorant and useless.

That's what the modern-day church endorses. I believe that completely, and it's the biggest reason I left. When you support the present status quo of bigotry, discrimination, hatred and institutionalized damning that exists at the highest level, you are culpable in remaining uneducated about where the money you put in the offering plate goes. The church was built as a movement of those who society didn't embrace - Jesus loved the prostitutes, tax collectors, and betrayers - and the men who followed in his footsteps were horribly persecuted. You, the modern white Christian who might be forced to actually touch a gay person (or god forbid bake them a cake) at someone point are not being persecuted. In fact, you've become the Roman Empire: your institution has made a decision to try and force their beliefs on the rest of the world, and they'll do it by brute force if necessary. I'm done with it, and I'm done pretending that it makes any sense. The bible is historically inaccurate at every turn. Creation science is an inherently contradictory term and if you've convinced yourself its anything but bullshit you've been brainwashed. (That's not to say you can't believe by faith that a god created the earth, but don't pretend you have any evidence).

I say all of this to say this: our society has horrific income equality, and it has come from institutionalized discrimination. Look at the pay rate, gender gap, incarceration rates (that's a HUGE example), urban plight, and so much more. We have systematically abandoned an entire segment of the population and the people who carry the religious torch that would seem perfectly fit to lead the charge against this are the ones most willing to give them the middle finger and blow by in a nice new car while they ask for change at the stop light. That's why I'm in law school. I don't want Christ in my schools or my government or my health care - I want his philosophy in all of those things; that philosophy that says we are all horribly imperfect and nothing we do can ever truly atone for that reality so why waste time hating one another when we can work together.

If you believe the lie perpetuated by some media that the poor deserve what they have, I can't help you. You're wrong, and if you don't already realize that you're remaining willfully ignorant of the truth. That's on you.

Yeesh. That was a journey. I'm sure we're all shocked that my side note ended up longer than the rest of my content. I had a professor tell me recently to "fall out of love with words" and it might be the best advice I've ever gotten. I love to write but it takes so much adjustment to rein in that desire for legal writing and be direct and to the point. It's not easy. (Look at that sentence! Only three words!)

Perhaps I'll be around here more often if I get the chance. I'm really only able to write this today because benevolent forces came together and magically cancelled both of my Friday classes and a scheduled meeting. I'm not sure what I did to deserve that (nothing) but it was a welcome and much-needed surprise.

I'll amend what I said at the beginning - Xanga isn't completely gone. She's different, much like the high school friend you run into at the grocery store the day before thanksgiving, but I'd like to believe that internally she's still the same. (Not literally, like servers and stuff, but some sort of in-between context). I'm not too far away from my 10th anniversary on here, so we'll see how the next months and years go. Maybe at 10 years I'll call it quits, take archive, cut my losses and move on to a pursuit more fitting for my future adult career. We'll see.

Law school is tough. I'll write here again soon, but for now my focus is on surviving.

Hey Xanga. Glad to see you're still here.

Here's the thing. I've been meaning to come here for weeks now, because I haven't put into words the massive changes that have occurred since the last time I put (figurative) pen to (figurative) paper. I'm a college graduate now, and enjoying the terror of my 0L summer before 1L year hits like a tank that asks way too many questions. (If you get that joke, wahoo philosophy). I'm excited, scared, nervous, motivated and thrilled, and believe it or not, those are simultaneous and omnipresent. Summer is one of those fascinating times where everything stands still. Network television shows, despite making their living on the sexy and controversial, skip over the season that might have the most of both categories simply because the summer is a wild card - no one knows if people will actually watch or not; summer is just like that. For me, it is, as so often seems to be the case, a holding cell. I've been processed and received a permanent assignment, but I can't arrive for two months due to a pre-arranged schedule. I'm not sure why that morphed into a prison metaphor, so just pretend I'm talking about an extended hospital stay. (Huh?) But seriously, I am ready for whatever comes next. More on that later.

Here's what distracted me when I arrived at my homepage last week, ready to get these thoughts out: Xanga is shutting down. Like, shit guys - what the hell am I supposed to do? They can't afford to move to a new server, and the crowdhosting page has, predictably, plateaued. Even still, even if the money is raised, we'd be moving to The Website Formally Known as Xanga. I donated, and I may donate again if it suddenly gets moving again. But I can't help but find myself angry. Xanga is a free website, but I pay to use it - I purchase premium services so my page is free of advertisements and easy to navigate. I invested a portion of my wages into this website because of what it contains; that is, it has within its walls a strange work of performance art that represents the last 8+ years of my life. If I wanted some mundane cookie-cutter, made-in-China happy meal toy blog, I'd go get a tumblr or whatever else is in right now. This place is special not because it has any particular special qualities, but because it has a perverse simplicity. You still have the option to use the old homepage, which was buggy and troublesome eight years ago, or the new homepage, which represents (when I'm being very gracious) a tiny step in the right direction. This place is flawed, and that is what makes it feel right.

Dear Xanga: it didn't have to be like this. I pay money to you for a service - it's not my fault that you managed to be surprised by your own finances. I love this website, and I can't help but appreciate the time and effort you put into ensuring it functions. Much of what you do behind the scenes goes unrecognized, I'm sure, and for that you deserve to be commended. But you let me down. You let down the people who stayed here, who didn't leave when the new fads came and went, who became a part of something that was about community for some, individuality for some, personal expression for some, but passion for all. You let us down, and it's probably going to result in the site closing down. 

I don't know what I'll do with this content if that happens. I don't blog because I particularly care about sharing my thoughts or making an impact. I blog because this place is a strange little accessory to my mental outfit. (Shitty analogy; drink!) I don't want to migrate to a new site and backdate my posts, nor do I have any interest in starting over. I'll donate, I'll promote, and I'll work with you to fight and help keep this site alive. In return, I want users to be respected. This cannot happen again.

To close: I start law school in just over two months. I want to be a lawyer because I believe, as I always have, that every human being is entitled to a vigorous and ethical defense. Whether imparted by a Creator or engrained by a society, we have fundamental rights that cannot be taken from us. The right to a fair trial for offenses committed is important to our society on a basic level, and I have a passion for advocacy on behalf of those who may not otherwise be able to obtain it. I don't care about money or prestige; I want to make a difference, somewhere, somehow. Call me idealistic, and I'll thank you for the compliment. Call me naive, and  I'll agree with you. (Call me maybe, this is crazy). I haven't the slightest clue where I might be thrown next, but I'll take that chance. 

Hopefully, I'll get to share my journey through law school with you right here. If I can't, well, thanks for the ride. 

Simple truths about marriage equality:

1. It does not affect our children. No impartial, peer-reviewed study has convincingly shown that children raised by same-sex couples are adversely affected. Naturally, our society is socialized to consider a traditional family as having a mother and a father, but the continued elimination of traditional gender roles is occurring regardless of same-sex marriage. Having two mothers or two fathers is something that children can both handle and learn to accept. 

2. What the Bible says is irrelevant. We don't legislate based on religion, and for you to say that your religious text should dictate how we enact policy is foolish and shameful. Seek to change the church, not the state. It's how we do things here in a country where we are forbidden from making a law accepting the establishment of religion.

3. It is not a state's rights issue. If we left civil rights to the south, African-Americans would still be using separate bathrooms and water fountains in some areas of this country. We don't leave certain crucial issues to the states because our national interest supersedes the need to give them autonomy. This is one of those issues.

4. Tradition doesn't matter. Traditional marriage is a term invented by those with no evidence to back their claims. "Traditional voting" excluded blacks and women. "Traditional labor standards" let children be exploited. "Traditional racial equality" let black people be treated as property and legislated as half-people. Tradition is irrelevant to the decision of allowing society to evolve and develop.

5. It isn't going to ruin marriage. Marriage as an institution is changing, but to attribute that change to the rights of same-sex couples is sheer desperation. Yes, we have a "marriage problem" of some sort in this country. Will denying same-sex couples the right to marry help lower heterosexual divorce rates? Of course not; it would be sheer lunacy to suggest as much. This argument is bogus.

6. Procreation is also irrelevant. We do not limit marriage to only those who are scientifically capable of procreating or engaging in what we have decided as a society is standard sexual behavior. If you deny same-sex marriage based on the grounds of procreation, we need to ban marriage after 60. 

7. It is going to happen. My generation overwhelmingly supports it. If we don't do it now, we'll do it as soon as the demographics have shifted enough that it can be passed nationwide. The arc of history is bending in the favor of equal rights. 

"Human rights for everybody; there is no difference." 

The hardest moment today was hearing pain in my father's voice as we blessed the food before dinner. He paused for just the briefest of moments before mentioning his brother, my uncle, who has barely begun a multi-year prison sentence. It was a subtle reminder on an otherwise joyous day that we live in an imperfect and frequently unforgiving world. While much of the holiday season rushes by in a seemingly perpetual blur of red and green, those small instances both harm and sustain us. We are faulty and irrevocably flawed, but each man and woman exists as an individual because of those very blemishes. I see no greater exchange of gifts than to suspend the past for a fleeting second and ask our respective higher beings to give everyone a moment of dignity. 

Blessed Christmas, friends.