Highways bring people in, and they keep people out. They make places accessible, and they also hide places, that don’t want to be found, away from the world.

There is a certain rhythm to highways. People rushing in their cars to make it from one place to the next. Time ticking down, a GPS blinking an estimated time of arrival at them from the dashboard. No one aware of the journey of the other cars around them.

These traffic-locked, road-rage producing mechanisms are things I avoid at all cost. I can’t bring myself to actually enter onto the ramp, get into a lane, and set myself to a destination.

Maybe that’s because I live in a place that few can get to, and few want to leave once they’re here.

The sunrise crests over the sandy, grassy hills, painting everything in its wake a beautiful orange hue. It spills into my living room, through the floor-to-ceiling windows and moves outward, towards the ocean. There are no sounds in the air, the serene quietness a staple of why I remain in this purgatory that I should have left ten years ago.

Carova, North Carolina is a prison and a haven. With no paved roads, it is the final frontier as tour guides and lame vacationers like to call it. I just call it home.

My tiny town, if you can call it that, lies on the outskirts of the popular vacation destination of the Outer Banks. But there are no grocery stores here, no real roads … my house doesn’t even have cable TV.

There is just the quiet; such resounding silence that it forces me to sit in my grief and pain most days until my ears buzz. But at least I have them, the only creatures who understand why my life will always be stuck in the past, unable to move forward.

Lucy neighs from the ground below, and I pick up the yellow ceramic coffee mug I’ve been sipping out of and take it out on the porch. Sitting in the old wooden rocking chair closest to the rail, I pick up a rhythmic pace and train my eyes on the creatures below.

Like me, they’re isolated, wild in their nature and unfit for human contact. They roam alone so often that they forget what it’s like to have to be in the space of another being. But not Lucy though, not today. Her foal follows a few feet behind her, awkwardly clinging to its newfound life. I wasn’t lucky enough to witness the birth, but the baby can’t be but four weeks old. It is feeble but adorable in the way only babies can be, even though it’s three times the size of a human newborn.

The foal is jet black where Lucy is a rusty chestnut, and when the older horse hears the creak of my rocking chair, she glances up. In her eyes, I can tell she was already aware of my presence. Even from two stories above the ground, they know my smell and my aura. Horses are a therapeutic breed of animal, just a glance into their eyes has you exploring depths within yourself you didn’t think were possible to reach.

And that’s all we ever do. Look at each other. Communicate by body language. I’m not allowed to speak to them; it’s a rule laid out by the North Carolina Wild Horse Association. These horses have been here for centuries longer than human beings even existed on these shores. They’re untrained, unbridled. By even putting up homes here, we’ve already disturbed their natural habitat. That’s why I keep my chatter, my noise, to a low minimum.

I never need to speak to them anyhow; Lucy especially can see right into the crevices and empty spaces of my soul. Spaces where love and unadulterated light used to live. She sees the shell of a person I am now, knows that the agony and grief have wrapped themselves so tightly around my heart that at any moment, the husk of an organ may just give out.

Carova is my prison and my haven. I grew up here, I have memories from this land that could shine in the darkest of places. It is, to me, the most beautiful place on earth; a little village of people and wild horses coexisting between the bay and the sea.

But it also holds the most painful moments of my life. Experiences that have broken me, bound me tight and sealed any possible recovery out of my body forever. I’ve resigned to stay in this place, to serve out my sentence. As if seeing the places where I used to be happy will serve as a just punishment for the half of my soul that died ten years ago.

And the one that slices my skin, peels away the layers of my cold heart the most … it sits a hundred feet away at the top of the hill that overlooks my house. I see it every night before bed, and every morning as the sun’s rays peak over the slanted, black roof.

The house that has sat abandoned for fifty years. The place that holds all of my firsts. And the very final, horrible last.