Years ago, we’d wander through this deteriorating psychiatric hospital, marveling at its architecture and artifacts, its masonry and woodwork, and immerse ourselves in the peaceful atmosphere of what were surely the best years of its life — the years of emptiness, with no patient suffering to contain within its walls. We’d go in any season, but it was the winters that brought the desolation of this asylum into starkest relief, when the complex floated in its own lonely spacetime in the wild Connecticut landscape.
Sometimes we brought our sleeping bags and nestled into dreams on stained frozen carpeting and woke up into orange sunrise with disheveled hair, apprehension and excitement. The coldest nights of my life have been spent sleeping on the floors of these places in warm camaraderie with friends, embracing discomfort for the sake of sinking into whatever the ruins had to tell us in the dark.
Many of these buildings have since been demolished and now haunt the landscape and us, who were able to see them as poetry and legacy, who found absurdity, humor and grief within their passages. The tunnels connecting residential wards to other buildings have been filled in, the scribbles on their walls lost to anyone but worms.
The halls and rooms were colder inside than out. They were packed with the icy sheen of half-remembered delusions, hallucinations and agitations. The weight of stories solidified into dense and frozen air, carrying with it scents of mold, dampness, old mattresses, clammy sheets unwashed for decades, spilled medications and the grave. The wire screens on windows, the iron bedframes and typewriter ink on medical records added linear abstraction that stood like rotting piers in a swirl of turbulent histories. We would walk into a room as into a drift of mutterings and appellations that brushed against our skin like cloudy breath. From the attics we watched snow float into bedrooms and ripped curtains whip in the wind. We didn’t talk much. We would laugh at the grotesqueness of this life. We dreamt of hot coffee and plates of steaming pasta and a campfire to warm our feet. We dreamt of curtains of icicles illumined by the rising sun. We dreamt of warm lips and melting crystals. We hugged ourselves inside the snow.
