Escape Through Music

The weeks wore on like a slow drizzle, each day so indistinguishable from the last that even memory hesitated. My grandmother’s choice of Mount Saint Canice had been a mistake of misunderstanding, one that she carried blissfully unaware. This was no school but a Magdalene Laundry, a vessel for reform or, as one might plainly put it, a repository for the unwanted.

Invisible specters named Anxiety and Depression whispered through the corridors. They settled into my bones, though I had no vocabulary to name them. The days unfolded to the melody of bells, rigorous silence, work, and the shadow pantomime of education. At thirteen, I found myself a tutor with a barren curriculum, an orchard stripped of its fruit.

Routine, you see, was the secret covenant at Mount Saint Canice, the linchpin that held us all together. It moved like clockwork, its ticks and tocks measuring out our days in calculated predictability. But when that routine splintered, it didn’t do so quietly. No, it came apart with a jarring screech, snapping us from our conditioned calm. Then, we saw the underbelly, the dark antithesis of our regulated lives — runaways darting through the dark, the explosive quarrels that erupted like fireworks. These suicides hung heavy in the air long after the act. Self-inflicted wounds told tales of desperation we couldn’t quite fathom. Babies wrenched from the arms that yearned to keep them cemented a different kind of solitude. Such were the catastrophes that would sometimes puncture our monotonous landscape, filling the silence not with murmurs but…