When I was six years old, my dad had taught me how to ride a bike. It was up the old, green barn and it had become a pivotal landmark in our little village. I had heard many stories about the green barn, from the frequent drug deals that took place to the story of how a man was found hanging with a rope around his neck.

Of course, if you actually knew the reasoning behind the green barn's use, it was an old hay barn that had burnt down in the 1960's and became a hangout for local drug dealers in the early 2000's. Syringes could be found all over the floor if you ever ventured inside.

I never knew if the story about the man who took his own life was true. It was probably a horror story that parents had made up in order to keep their children away but we believed it anyway because, after all, we were just kids.

In its more later years, people had used it as a dumping ground for their unwanted items and you'd often find broken toys, dirty nappies and syringes in its possession. As children, it was deemed dangerous and when the days of playing outside with friends was still existent, venturing down to the green barn was rebellious and exciting and the adrenaline of being caught playing there was something I had always loved. Even as a child, I had always loved rebellion.

My sister, Megan and I, rode our bikes up there often as kids and we giggled at the thought of mum and dad catching us by ourselves in a 'dangerous' place.

"Are you sure it's okay here?" her small, six year old frame asked me, staring at my nine year old self. Her pink, flowery helmet sat upon her head, her hands grasping the handles of her Barbie bicycle as she hesitantly looked at the rundown building, it's decaying frame towering over us, before glancing in my direction.

"It'll be fine," I said, the adrenaline rushing through my body having remembered my mum's words earlier of making sure we stayed around the block and not going to places that weren't safe. "Just make sure you don't go inside," I continued, watching her as she cycled in circles outside of the barn.

We returned home that evening and when mum asked us if we had fun, we had replied with a distinctive yes and that we had gone for a little cycle around the village, our eyes glinting at our little secret of leaving out the part of going to the barn.

When I turned eleven, I began catching the bus for school every morning and that required me walking past the green barn as it was a shortcut to get to the bus stop.

Every morning, Susannah would knock on my door and we'd walk to the bus stop together, cutting through the path at the back of my house that led us towards the green barn. Long, weeded, grass lands surrounded the path and the barn, making it impossible for us to not stick to the footpath that had been created for pedestrians like us. We talked about everything and nothing at all, the so-called dramas of year seven lives flowing in and out of our conversations and the first year of secondary school seemingly so exciting for us.

Eventually I stopped taking the bus as I was late every morning, always running to catch it and missing it by seconds. I'd have to do the walk of shame back to my house and tell my dad I needed a lift to school as I missed the bus once again.

I knew a girl in primary school once called Ellie, a real mean girl, who, when we were in year seven (she went to one school and I went to another), made me try --what she claimed was marijuana-- for the first time in the green barn. She had thought she'd found a plant at the park that was supposedly cannabis so we all sat in a circle outside of the barn, passing around this joint along with her mum's lighter, and each took a hit. It was a shit experience and I don't think I even felt anything but we all thought we were cool because we were apparently doing drugs even though I had no idea what marijuana was when I was eleven. She just told me it was supposed to be good and that we'd look cool so I went along with it.

As years went on and I grew older, the green barn became more abandoned and became a bigger dumping ground and eventually, even drug dealers stopped using it as a secret meet up location. They had closed off the path to the barn entirely and we couldn't use it as a shortcut anymore, my walks coming to an end as I had often used it as a comfort to go there when I wanted to clear my head.

I was driving home one day along the back road, my eyes instinctively glancing to where the barn was when I noticed it was no longer there anymore. I did a double take, my eyes wide as I saw the rubble in its place, the broken pieces of the barn scattered all along the floor and mounds of dirt piled up where it had once been. The barn had been completely knocked down and in its place, men in construction uniforms milled around the area and I couldn't do anything but watch through the metal fence as they began picking up the left over pieces.

It was as if my childhood and teenage years had been completely ripped away from me and the only memories I now had of the green barn were the ones in my head. The first place I had ever learnt to ride my bike, the first place I had ever felt a clasp of rebellion, the first place I learnt what a syringe full of heroin was, was taken away. Our village had seen it as a landmark, that one pivotal abandoned thing that every town or village had like old, abandoned buildings or train tracks that the kids would go to just because they could. In my case, the green barn had been my abandoned place and now our place was dead.

The green barn was the metaphorical sense of purgatory, the in between of life and death. It was once alive until it burnt down, gaining the title of purgatory. Now that purgatory was gone, it was just death. It had become death and the green barn was suddenly no more.