Flashlight Hours

There is a particular silence inside an abandoned sanatorium that no archive reading room can teach you. I have spent the winter getting into a few of them - legally where possible, carefully where not - with a flashlight, a dust mask, and the growing suspicion that this is no longer just curiosity.

The wards are what the photographs always show: peeling paint, iron bed frames, a wheelchair someone arranged for drama. What the photographs skip is the paperwork. Intake ledgers swollen with damp.

Treatment schedules still pinned to a corkboard. In one basement, a filing cabinet nobody had bothered to empty, because paper was the cheapest thing in the building. The institutions left, and their records stayed behind like a shed skin.

I keep photographing pages whose names I have no use for yet. Somebody wrote them down once, in duty or in boredom, and it feels wrong to let the mold have the only copy. The notebook is filling. I am starting to think there is a book in this - something about the wards, and what the paperwork admits that the official histories do not.