I was inside this fortress.
But I wasn’t a king in a tower. I was a small boy, sitting in a ball in the center, in a silent clearing. Alone.
“There’s no getting past the wall.”
“What if there was a way?” he asked me.
“There’s no way,” I said. Then I corrected myself. “I don’t know a way.”
“It’s safe inside the wall,” he said compassionately.
I didn’t say anything. We’d already had this conversation, so many times.
Why was he bringing it up now?
“You remember, I used to encourage you to envision yourself as a man inside that fortress,” he said. “I hoped you would, and that one day we might get you to take a step outside the wall. But over time we came to realize, together, that the wall was too crucial to you. It was your survival mechanism. So, we took some time nurturing the wall. Fortifying it in your mind. It seemed a healthy exercise, for a while. It seemed to carry you through a great many difficult times.”
I waited, listening. Rory didn’t talk a whole lot. When he talked a lot, it was time to listen. It usually meant he’d been thinking on something for a long time, and Ishouldlisten.
“We’ve talked about how your father did the best he could for you,” he went on. “That the decisions he made came from a place of love, and you’ve recognized that. He was younger than you are now when you were born. He did what he knew how to do as a father, which was try to protect his son. Those were your words.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my jaw, getting more and more uncomfortable with this conversation. “I know.”
“He was the first builder of the wall.”
I sucked in a breath. Rory had never said anything like that before.
But the truth of it resonated in a place so deep, I recognized it as fact. It left me speechless.
I stopped pacing and sat down.
“You didn’t know it,” he kept going, “because you were too young to know it. But it was your father who led you into that quiet clearing, and he laid the first stones. He built the wall for you because you couldn’t. You were just a boy. He kept laying stones and even though you didn’t know what he was building, you watched him lay the foundation. You watched him build the fortress around you, until one day you were strong enough to take over. You continued building the wall yourself, just as your father had done before you.”
I was listening, and I could see the fortress. Not from the outside. As always, I was inside. I was the boy. And the wall was so high around me, I couldn’t see the sky anymore.
“Is there anyone inside the wall with you now?” Rory’s voice came from somewhere outside. Like I was asleep and he was awake, somewhere beyond. I’d shut my eyes. The fortress was all I could see.
“No.”
“Your father doesn’t come there anymore.”
“No. He doesn’t.” I started to cry, but my eyes were closed. I pushed my thumbs into my eyes until the wall of the fortress turned red.
“He used to visit. Didn’t he. In the early days. Long ago.”
“Yeah. He did.”
“I know it’s painful.” Rory’s voice lowered gently. “The pain is where you have to go. You need to walk into it. Otherwise, you just keep running. You keep building the wall. And the really tragic part, Johnny, is that that boy never becomes a man.”
I opened my eyes, blinking the tears away. Rory had come to sit down, on a chair across from me.
“Have you ever asked yourself,” he said gently, “really asked yourself, do you want to be alone in the fortress?”
“No. Of course I don’t want to be alone. But it’s impossible.”
“Ask yourself now,” he said. “How did your father get inside the wall?”
“What do you mean?”
