The Beginning by Peeja Blackbird | The Quill

I was five years old.

Sitting in the backseat of my grandparents' car, I was watching the world blur past the window. We were somewhere near the Mason-Dixon line, a place I had never heard of but would always remember.

It was the middle point between one life and another, between who I had been and who I could be.

I was on my way to Alabama, to my father, my sister, and to a home I had never known. My grandparents in Ohio had done their best, I guess. They bought me things, filled the silence with objects instead of questions. But they didn’t see me. Not really. I was a shadow in their home, something to be kept but not understood.

But in Alabama, things were different. Having a sister to talk to helped me realise that my life didn't begin and end in Ohio. I had clean clothes that smelled like soap and sunshine. I had full meals that didn’t come from a box or a drive-thru. My great-grandfather’s pig farm stretched wide, the land open and breathing, the fields endless under a sky that felt bigger than any I had seen before.

“But in Alabama, things were different”

I would slip outside, past the porch steps, and into the open fields.

Before that trip, I never really understood what it meant to escape. But being there, in Alabama, something shifted inside me. It was the first time I realized that my imagination could be more than just daydreaming—it could be a retreat. I could close my eyes, and for a moment, I wasn’t where I was. I wasn’t in a place that felt wrong, disconnected, and lonely. I could picture myself somewhere peaceful, somewhere better.

I hate calling it a "safe place" because it sounds so cliché, but that’s what it was—it was a place where I could hide, even if just for a moment. But that retreat, as comforting as it was, wasn’t always healthy. It didn’t just help me escape; it became a way for me to disconnect from everything around me. I started to block out the bad things, the noise, the confusion. And as I did that, I got better at compartmentalizing my life, putting everything into little boxes in my mind so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.

This experience marks a turning point for me—it's where "Blackbird 1" came to be, and it’s something I carry with me.