Written by Sunny Jodoin

Art by Cameron Metters

The Barn is where things go to look poetic and beautiful as they die.

Mold covers every surface, eating away at fading paint and fabric and flesh. Even if you can’t see it, you can smell it. It hangs in the air with its sour odor as a reminder that you, too, are rotting alongside every carefully arranged art piece and every delicately arranged memory of your past and dream of your future.

The Barn is where things go when their lives are over.

Or at least when that is what they believe to be true.

…

I think that I died this summer.

Or maybe I was dead long before and my soul finally realized its separation from the flesh of my body.

Maybe I died on the day of my high school graduation? Or when I watched my former classmates post about moving into their freshman year college dorms?

I really think it was this summer, though. I think that was when the cord was cut.

I spent most of my formative teenage years in a long-term relationship with someone named Bug. If that doesn’t tell you why I am the way I am, then I don’t know what could. Bug was raised by punk rockers who had held onto many of their free-spirited ways as they progressed into old age, but seemed to forget what it was like to be seventeen and in love. For this reason, Bug never let his family learn of our relationship, even after I placed a ring on his finger- a decision that baffled most, but not me. I really knew what I was doing and knew that it was right. I knew a lot of things with my whole heart back then that were not true.

Bug and I had plans. We dreamed of running away together and starting a life in Vermont before becoming famous rock musicians. These dreams were more real than the life around me. (Maybe that was when the dying started? When I gave up on living presently?)

Inevitably, our fantastical plans failed. I was devastated, but I revised, mostly alone.

Suddenly, there it was: The Barn. A family home nestled behind my great-aunt’s house in the town I was raised in. It was rarely entered, aside from when a group of raccoons decided to move in or a light mysteriously turned on, needing to be turned off by my hesitant family. What you must understand is that there is no place on Earth like The Barn. Renovated by my deceased great-uncle and his ex-husband, The Barn is an artistic masterpiece filled with strange art from their many years in Europe and definitely-not-up-to-code wiring. By this time, most of the vintage porn had been cleaned out by my poor grandmother, but there were still similar surprises around every corner.

It was supposed to be a jumping point, an extended prologue, an unexpected chapter added before the happy ending. Bug and I would use it to get our footing in adulthood and finally be together every day. It was supposed to help me live, help us live.

Instead, it became my crypt.

I broke up with Bug in June after he failed to move in with me. Somewhere, deep within myself, I knew it would never happen. Maybe it was the signs of immaturity I tried to ignore, or maybe it was that he was never packed. Perhaps it was a desperate message from the part of me that was dying before the summer began, pleading with the rest of me to accept logic, accept defeat.

I know now that I was younger then. Not technically by much, but in spirit I was still an ignorant child. I was willfully ignorant too. I didn’t want to listen to my desires for things I had thrown away, things meant for kids like me.

I realized, slowly, that I felt I had missed my chance to be nineteen. I missed my chance to go off to school when my peers did. I missed my chance to date around freely. I missed my chance to be normal. As the world around me broadened, I felt myself narrow until I had been backed into a corner.

But then I remembered one final, possible lifeline: surrender.

I applied to college at the end of high school and was accepted at Champlain and waitlisted at UVM. All I knew at that time was that I wanted to be in Burlington, and Bug had convinced me that was all we needed. My greatest regret in life was never responding to that acceptance. In the endless days that followed graduation, a looming thought often whispered to me in my darkest moments.

You could be in art school right now.

In mid-August, I admitted to myself, my mother, and my whiplashed therapist that I wanted, or maybe needed to go back to school. I was too young to be letting myself rot without ever having lived.

On a hot Monday night, I sat down in my pajamas on The Barn’s molding couch and sent an email to Champlain College Admissions using a professional tone that I had not used in over a year, and with a confidence that I did not have. I was asking for the “best path” towards “getting to Champlain in the most expedient and direct way possible”. I anticipated a response in two to three business days reiterating the information I had already read on the website about transfer credits and Fall of 2026.

I plaited my hair and laid down in my bed. Or rather, my uncle’s bed, which he shared with his ex-husband, and with his ghost when he left. I, too, shared the bed with a ghost that summer. I thought it was Bug’s. Or perhaps wanted it to be. I know now that the one I felt close to me each night was the ghost of myself, all I could have been if I had only chosen to live. He hovered and watched a body writhe in pain and conflicted anticipation for the final night.

I was born the next day, a Tuesday, when I opened my email to a quick and unexpected response.

Like most days, I was alone in The Barn, turning over my shoulder at lingering shadows. I slept until the early afternoon and awoke in a humid sweat before coming down to scrounge for food in my unruly fridge, half-broken by the heat. Again, I sat on the couch. A sense of dread filled the stomach of the body as I saw a reply in my inbox.

I opened it and skimmed only the first paragraph. Before I could think, tears streamed down my face and I was calling my mother.

At first, I could not get words out of my mouth. I think this was the moment I started pushing my way inside the body, upon realizing that it wasn’t quite my mouth anymore and it might not have ever been.

I read aloud, “Hi Sunny. I’m so glad you reached out! There is a possibility that we can have you join us this Fall with move-in this Friday and classes starting next Monday.”

It seemed impossible.

I remember saying, through sobs, “I don’t know if I can do it.”

But I could. A body could not. An ignorant child could not. But me? The me who was born on that day? The me that now writes this in my college dorm room? I can do anything.

Upon introducing myself for the first time at college, something I thought I would never do, I realized who I had become. The person who was rotting in The Barn was not the person who stood in that classroom.

I did die this summer. And that’s okay. Because now I am so alive that nothing else matters.

The shell of my body has been filled with its intended subject: Me, in the flesh.