Dark Academia

Dark Academia

By Alarson

You know, those lonely Dark Academia houses? The ones with the sharp roofs and turrets, with the window reading nooks and the dark hardwood floors? The houses with the ornate mirrors, the oil paintings, and the pinned butterflies? They’re beautiful, aren’t they? 

Well, I grew up in one. 

A house nearly too big to be called a house but not quite big enough to be a mansion. With long corridors flanked by tables piled high with books on art, gardening, music, and other subjects uninteresting to children. With ivy growing over the hundreds of years old stonework, with a garden so overgrown I could never walk through it without gathering dew on my socks and jeans, but tended to with so much care. 

I wonder, sometimes, if that’s where the ache in my heart came from. I wonder if it’s just tortured-artist-melancholy, handed down through the generations that lived in that house on the hill, surrounded by fields. Then, of course, I remember that those who inhabited the household as many secrets as the creaky staircase that leads to the attic and the out-of-tune piano in the entrance. The kind, caring hands who put so much into the garden belonged to a woman who spoke nothing but lies and trickery, so focused on her own image that she didn’t think twice about her children. The art books belonged to a painter who abandoned his craft for a bicycle, the means of his escape. Though he returned eventually. As we all do. All except me. All except the only child of the eldest daughter. The one who bore the brunt of the gardener's cruelty. 

We’re safe now, a sea and half a country away from the almost-mansion, living in a Dark Academia house. More of a farm than a house, really. Instead of turrets and ivy, we have a cellar with bats and too many bottles of homemade apple juice to count, and a purple wisteria that has at least twenty years on me. We don’t have the long corridors, but our staircase is stacked with books, and our walls do disappear under watercolour and pastel canvases. The pinned butterflies are replaced by live ones, flittering around the back garden in the summer. The garden, which is just as wild as her garden but infinitely more lively. We have raspberry and rose bushes and a young oak tree that somehow planted itself. We have cats and sweet little birds, safe out of their reach in the oak and lilies and foxgloves and snowdrops in the winter. And most of all, we have memories of 

Well… I’d like to say we have laughter and joy and safety… We did. Sometimes. 

The big house on the hill, the one with the turrets and the hand-built cabins, it haunts us. It makes our skin sensitive and raw as we bare our teeth at each other. Plates have been smashed, mirrors broken, pillows gutted of their feathers. We’ve screamed and sobbed and ignored each other for days. That ache in my heart goes deep and sends out vines of barbed wire to choke me when I stop and think for too long. So I don’t. I run, I dance, I force summers to be fun. At the end of the day, I settle down in bed and have to keep going, reading, singing, writing until my body fails from exhaustion. 

I suppose it fits, a Dark Academia child who grew up in a Dark Academia house with a Dark Academia family, will never truly shed their essence of melancholy. You can unpin the butterfly, give it a flower to drink from and a window to fly out of, but it’ll never be anything more than a pretty corpse.