I keep searching for some trace of that boarding school I went to, but there's nothing. I look every so often, you know. The mood will hit me, or the memouries, or something, and I'll sit here til 2 or 3 in the morning. Chasing shadows. Nothing. Not a single one of the kids, staff, anything.

Well, almost. About 8 months ago, I came face to face with my one and only lead. It was an archived newsclipping from some teensy little local-to-nowhere daily paper. It mentioned a school I'd never heard of, and that the person I remembered as my Headmistress having taken a job with this new school.

The article was dated my birthday, no less.

Anyway, it made me wonder, and after a lot of digging -- we're talking like through every search engine and link list site known in the free world -- I managed to fit a piece of the story together. Seems my school had closed down in 1994. Two years before! I'd been hunting for something I'd never find. No wonder.

And that sent me off on a whole new broodfest. Why did the school close after only 6 years of operation? Did someone finally get the balls I never had, and sue them? Where did the kids go? Where did the rest of the staff go? One of the sister schools, maybe? And...

Who the hell was I going to hate now? Weird, I know. It's just, I'd lived so long building up this fear and hate of this thing in my past, this school and these people. It was like, in a flash, no longer than it takes to load a web page, someone had reached into my closet, and yanked out my skeleton. Not only that, but who would believe me, now? Now that I couldn't really even prove that the place ever existed at all.

I have survivor guilt. I've got it real bad. It's been 9 years now, and I can't get it out of my system. I can't stop thinking that I should've done something. Should've gotten off my duff and told somebody. Should've been the strong one, afterall, I was the one that made it out, right? But I didn't do a damn thing. I came home, and did my best to forget I'd ever been there at all.

I suck. I had this wonderfully huge purpose in life, and I sat on my ass because I was afraid. I'd lay awake at night, all twisted up inside because I'd managed to convince myself that if I did ever say anything, they'd find me. And they'd take me back there. And that, if they did, I'd have to kill myself, because I was already too tired to fight them anymore.

You know what? You have no idea what I'm talking about.

Here's some of the school story.

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