A bit different

I've always known I'm a bit different. Maybe I'm packed with Ego or the terrors of the centuries. I wander round, my voice weaved into the old. My blood pulses with England but the hills are older than my blood, the green and pleasant lumps in the skyline. I walk around my complexity and pretend I am not alienated but written in the stars and the soil. Today I am visiting the home of my ancestors, catholic and of the aristocracy. Ripped wide open to the public who come here to feed on history and absorb the day in those stone walls and lovely gardens. Yet I am not feeling it, only the threat of the library, where ghosts dance with murderous echoes and the books shout remarks. Something has always been wrong in the library. Washed blood, strangling hands, furious fists. Remorse. Rage. Coverup, complication, coins.

I don't pay and I slide in. My adoptive parents beam, my boyfriend mutters in political tones and fair comments on the distribution of wealth, which I think is perfectly fine. Yet I wonder if he might come to the library and observe the energy that has been haunting my dreams, as he is particularly psychic and will comment easily on the eerie reality that lives there after centuries of threat. With a hades moon he lives in atmosphere and can define it. Obviously there was a murder here, feels like a nightmare locked in a cupboard, a chilling spectre, that sings the old songs when peoples nerves are most exposed. My parents picnic easily outside. My bones are full of grey matter vibrating with dark swathes of historical feeling. No longer is the chapel a place of frantic prayer as the royal wolves howl and bang on the doors, as catholic treasures are hidden in secret places.

High treason hangs in the air colliding with the pleasant nature of the life of aristocracy. Where peasants have nothing and curse the beings that wander easily in a dream, never feeling their medieval hunger, their fights in the mud and the lack that curses their lives. My boyfriend revels in the people, the rights that were ignored. I celebrate my blood because it resonates in my very body and I am bound. I take my boyfriends hand and we wander to the library where he almost throws a fit because of an old dusty book on how to talk to commoners. I think of the english character, and feel nostalgic. But the rooms here throb with threat. The library is its pinnacle and my ancestors would have lounged here, absorbed in stories and daydreams. All the while, the , protestant threat might appear in the windows. Galloping horses, old faces filled with the fury of the law. The noose might appear in their thoughts, or a heavy blunt axe, blood and severed heads in a gorging crowd, or a body ripped into four. Scattered blood, so easily loved, and spilt.

Everything feels wrong today. Yes, there are secrets whispered in the library. They find their way on the wind and howl around the moat. My boyfriend can hear them but my parents are caught in their own boxes and don't entertain these things. They would rather sample the tea and eat beautiful sandwiches. I think I could easily get lost in here. Not because it's vast but because the stories written into the house are compelling and suck me into their vortex where I can hear the screams and the laughter and all the various madnesses sampled by my family. I don't walk out of the library. A part of me sits down and will never leave.

I eat a free cream tea and my boyfriend is livid as he pays for his. Understandable, as I appreciate the cream and beautiful fruit scone. I'll pay for his, its only fair. This world needs to trust and share. I appreciate that, it settles on me like a great weight that I carry. Still, I think of the me left in the library. Maybe my boyfriend can unlock its black shadow doors and balance its psyche. That thing, that entity, that house.

In my dreams a cat that belongs to my late grandmother claws me because it loves my late father and my love is too late. It lands on me like another medieval threat. We all drive away as I am locked in, what a day I sigh, with a dark fierce heart. It will take a while for me to settle. While pieces of me are left all over this land. Locked in the library for misadventure, for fortune stolen, its whispers on my side still, threaded in to the collective. A face that is known somehow. A voice that sings its story when others are silent. They lady in grey is part of my family story. She sings when a death is to occur. My aura vibrates in grey, in the muted energy of me. You can hear my voice in the library, singing distant songs. Soaring like a bird, on its last wings.

I wander in the candlelight. I know the shadows it casts. I wonder if I could stay here for eternity. There are enough books, enough dreams to collect. Always food in the pantry. Every summer is celebrated, every Christmas grand. Once time has passed midnight it could be an entirely different day. It could be right instead of wrong. Really, the library just wanted to collect me. It wanted me to write different songs, whisper new secrets, not to be afraid but join in the lunacy, the mental illness that can collect here. As the shadows pull and the ghosts wander. We are one. Whether our bellies are full or empty, rich or poor. I wonder how the rest of Madeleine is faring, is she trapped in the other world? Does she embrace her multidimensional self or is she still scattered and lost on the wind? She belongs here. In the grey, in the screams of silence, in the dreams of this house.