I know there are some of you reading this who know exactly what collective grief feels like. Now, it feels like another layer of cruelty to have to return: To the isolation, to the lockdown, to the years of solitude.

And I don’t just mean in the program, I mean in the years after too. The solitude of processing, of coping, of trying to move through it, alone, far from anyone who understood what we went through.

After we left the program, they made it hard for us to find one another. But we found ways. A phone number in the pages of a book, a memorized name and city. We weren’t sure who would be waiting on the other side, but still, we looked. We searched for each other on Facebook, in survivor’s groups.

People post what evidence they have - grainy group photos. We look desperately to find our own faces. Is that me? Was I there? Was it real?

We look for each other but so many disappeared. Most of us wanted to disappear. Needed to, to build a new life. But now, we feel the web pulsing. We feel it calling us together.

Not everything we share is around grief. Collective memories hold a certain type of psychic power of their own.

We’re tied together by the moments, those scenes that have now forever become frozen in time in our memory: The strip search at intake. Getting your rule card. Heel-toe. The Hungry Horse. Worksheets. Intervention. The schedule: Sunday cleaning days, Mr. Henry the vacuum cleaner, Thursday burrito nights, kitchen duty days. The food. The bagels during quiet time, praying it would be blueberry.

And of course, the rules. And the privileges that came from following them. Music, that was another thing we all remembered, although the soundtracks were different. For many, it was Space Odyssey, for me, it was the Tracy Chapman album that played on repeat in Mr. Diamond’s classroom.

Almost everyone remembered night wake ups. The night the Destiny girls ran, naked into the snow. Being woken up for “process,” stacking rocks in silence, pushups in the workout area, shuffling outside in the freezing night, eyes adjusting to the dark. When our dictator stood in the middle of the grass field, drunkenly demanding everyone sing to him.

This collective memory gives us strength - a string that ties us together, a net that catches us when we need it most. That pulls us together, protects us against everyone who says it wasn’t that bad, everyone who wasn’t there.

By now it seems apparent to most that this is not something we will simply “get over.” People say they understand it, but they don’t, not really, not in the way we do.

They’re still entertaining a fantasy that there is a before and after, that we’ll leave our houses and say, “That’s it. It’s done.” Time to file this period away in a folder marked past and move on. Let the motions and motors of life continue to run.

They are still talking in terms of going back, talking about return. They don’t see we bought a one-way ticket. They don’t understand that that place is no longer there.

I know because I tried. After I left, I pushed it deep down inside of me. Tried to forget about it, thought of other things. I carefully constructed a life in which Spring Creek Lodge did not exist.

In my new life, by all accounts, everything was okay. Really. Except for sometimes when it wasn’t. Except for sometimes, when the empty wine bottles piled up, when my prescriptions ran out too soon, when I couldn't stop the flood, when my life vest of whiskey and cigarettes failed and I couldn't ignore the invisible storm I weather alone.

I choose to believe that in my new life, the past couldn’t touch me. It became a story I know, not one I’d lived. It was “what I went through.” Those four words: the going through, the passing, the moving as if through a body of water, or the walking down of a street. Something that you can go through and then have passed. A journey to be had.

“In May, a lawsuit against a World Wide-related company was resolved for $3 million without the company admitting liability — nine years after a 16-year-old girl hanged herself in a bathroom stall at a facility in Montana called Spring Creek Lodge Academy, which has since closed. Before her suicide, the girl had been punished by being forced to carry a bucket of rocks, according to depositions by the school’s owners and staff.”

I spent months in a bunk bed by hers. Nearly 15 years later I still can’t read this without crying. What happens inside there, that you can forget. But what happens inside you, the unraveling, the aftermath, the many ways you’ll break over the years to come, this is what stays with you.

See, no matter how hard you try, the past is still there, will always be there: A small little rock in your stomach, threatening to become an avalanche.

There are many accounts of what happened - what continues to happen - inside places like this. The abuse, the violence, the mind games.

This is not about what happens inside those places. It’s about what happens inside us, the survivors. What happens after. The unraveling.

I still see you in my dreams

You come to me sometimes. In passing faces on the street. In the dreams, we’re always together, as we were then. Heel toe line and count off: one, two, three, four, five. No one missing? And out we went. Hard to recognize, jeans and t-shirts and laughs.

How many of us were there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. We weren’t alone. There were other schools likes ours: Paradise Cove. Tranquility Bay. Casa by the Sea. All of us spread like stars in the night sky, never to meet again.

I imagine us in another life, re-born as animals. We would be deep sea fish. The bioluminescent kind that light up, even in the darkest depths. They managed to adapt to live against crushing pressure that would kill other fish. But they’re survivors, too.

I wonder where they are now. How they are. How many are sitting right now just as I am - at a kitchen table, or a back stoop, or a bar stool - drowning. Surviving in whatever ways we find.

Do they know it’s not their fault?

Do they know it will be okay?

All of us, trying to bury the past but instead finding glowing orbs in our stomach urging us to remember, remember. We gather, drawn together like fireflights by the light.

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