Of Kin and Cloud

Your mother and I sat in plastic, neon green chairs in the empty preschool room as your speech therapist shuffled through chart-filled printouts. A rainbow of plastic beads hung from her neck, matching her tap-tap-tapping fingernails. She sighed, and looked up at us, throwing on a bright smile.

“Well, there is good news. Azel has indeed shown some improvement,” she said in a chirpy tone. “She is starting to improve with sight words, especially when it comes to animals.”

“That is great,” your mother said with a high-pitched ting of positivity.

“However,” your speech therapist said. “She is still showing signs of severe speech disorders. When combining this with your teacher’s reports of her extremely short attention span, I think it may be a good idea to have her tested.”

“Tested for what?” I said in a tone more defensive than was needed.

Your speech therapist sighed, all the perkiness and positivity in her voice dissipating in a flash.

“A number of things. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Dyslexia. Possibly autism. Mr. Dawson, the truth is that no one in Azel’s class can understand her, and she can’t understand them. There’s a disconnect we are struggling to understand,” she said.

I stood up and walked to the window. I heard your mother and the speech therapist talk behind me, but it all melted into a din of which I had no tolerance. I walked to the paint station, where portraits of dinosaurs and dolls and doggies dried on clothespins. In the middle of them was a painting that was a crude, smudged painting of an angelic figure with bright blue wings hovering over many green triangles. You know the painting. You paint it every chance you get. It has gotten better with age. When you first started painting it, it was merely scribbles. Now, it’s as if I could feel the mountain air, hear the flapping of your wings.

I walked over to the window. I could see the children play on the playground. They played on the swings, the slide, the monkey bars. I tried to hide so you couldn’t see me, but you wouldn’t even if I stood right behind you. You were, as I predicted, at the edge of the recess yard, looking up at the swaying pine trees with your arms stretched. Above, imposing rose and charcoal clouds hung, blending both beauty and storm into the world. They swirled and flew and fell. They danced while being still.

No children were near you, but that wouldn’t be a surprise to you. Your fingers fidgeted as if you were typing something or playing some foreign musical instrument. Your mark, a snow-white spiral covering the entirety of your left leg, popped before your olive-shaded skin and went back and forth as you swayed. You smiled as you were in your own world, as if you were immersed in a serenade. As if this world’s bared teeth of procedure and process wasn’t chomping at the bits to get you. As if this world deserved you.

A primordial sorrow drowned my heart as I watched you in your joy.

We drove the long way home so you can see the pond. The two fake sawn that swayed in the center never failed to make you chuckle.

“Dey reeree dending beh birdasa,” you said, laughing.

“What’s that, honey?” your mother asked.

“Dey predned to beh birdasas,” you said.

There was silence in the car as we both tried to translate what you were trying to say.

“Honey, try to say it slower,” I said.

You growled in frustration. Your eyes creased with anger. I saw in the rear-view mirror your hands morphed into fists.

“I said,” you said, so much louder now. Nearly a screech. “Dey prepend to beh birdasas.”

“They’re pretending to be birds,” your mother said, as if she solved a puzzle, a puzzle of which the excitement of solving has long passed.

“Yes,” I said. “They’re pretending.”

“No,” you said, now in an angry fit. “Birdasas! Birdasas!”

Your mother and I were quiet, both more worry-stricken than angry at the outburst. We were both mournful and petrified. Not because of any diagnoses, not because of anything any teacher could say or do. But we both knew the life that was ahead for you. Well, the life that we thought was ahead for you.

I watched the traffic lines on the road zip by like far-off comets, from celestial heaven that no one here bothered to consider. And I thought back to that night that will forever burn in my memory.

One moment I was watching the low-spinning ceiling fan blades cast shadows on the bedroom ceiling, watching my eyelids sink, and in another moment, I was a world away. I stood upon a tall, jagged mountain top, where bare, twisted jade trees spiraled toward an eggshell sky. The air was warm, despite puffs of cold breeze dancing in the endless, open air, as if they were isolated orbs of winter breeze in a spring evening. I looked over to see your mother was with me, and I smiled. My best dreams are ones with her in it. Yet something inside, right from the start, told me it wasn’t just a dream. It felt as real as everyday life, real as the most important kind of memories. The ones that sear the silence of your self.

Your mother looked confused, almost frightened. I felt almost at peace. We reached for each other, and I squeezed her hand.

We realized, then, that we weren’t alone. Looking out at an endless sea of green, mountainous peaks, stood a tall man, robes in flowing emerald silk. He had cerulean wings that were larger than that of any bird. His skin was the shade of yours. He turned to face us, and a white spiral was over his face.

“You two are about to find a little girl,” he said in a deep, serene voice. “Her name will be Azelreigh, and she will not be of your world, yet be raised in it. Instead, she is from here, from Dezaltos. Do your best to help her retain her identity. Do your best to raise her. Now, go find her amongst the grass.”

Then, we woke up simultaneously, jolting out of bed at the sound of thunder, and we sprinted down the stairs. I couldn’t help but thinking, “Did we really just share a dream? Are we really running for the same reason?”

Yet, sure enough, in the middle of a thunderstorm, we heard your wails from the back yard. You were laid bare, not even a blanket to cover you. I took off my worn band shirt and swaddled you. Yet, still, understandably, you screamed.

Your name never left our heads. Azelreigh. Welcome to the world. Welcome to our world, at least. We did our best to help you make it yours too. How good of a job we did, only you could say.

As an infant, you cried and laughed and stared at the luminescence of the nursery’s warm lamp in wonder. Your eyes were the colors of the cosmos, and we wondered at the spiral on your leg. We both agreed that it was the mark of a Dezaltosian god, perhaps their god of thunder, who used a majestic wrench, not a hammer. It couldn’t be just a birthmark. Your quickly blossoming temper was the fire of the Dezaltosian god of war, whose eyes burned with the coals of battle when he didn’t get his own way. Your babbling quickly evolved into your own language, obviously Dezaltish. When you were sick, it was because your body didn’t like the food or the germs or the air of this place. When you fell and chipped your front tooth, sending wails into the air for hours, it was because the gravity of our world is different than yours. You were a product of your own world.

Despite all this, it was us three, and we were as happy as could be. Stressed, tired, irritated, and overwhelmed. But, happy.

Then, the neighbor kids would try to play with you, and you didn’t understand their games, and they didn’t understand your unique way of talking. It would cause fights, and we would try to be as objective as possible. After all, we could hardly understand you too.

The rolling of your “r’s,” the extra syllables. The long streams of babababa and renarenarenarena and tutututu. We would be pushed to tears trying to understand you sometimes.

I could only imagine how you felt. It would push anybody to frustration, to anger, to hitting. And that’s what it did to you. I remember carrying you back to the house, your skin cherry-red in pure rage. The neighbor girl was screaming in her father’s arms. A shard of stick lay in the middle of the cul-de-sac. We didn’t like that neighborhood, anyway.

Yet you did find some solaces. Fractures of a forgotten peace in this world that most of these people wouldn’t be able to find. You found the quiet that was left amongst the trees. Animals didn’t seem afraid of you. Frogs and squirrels and even deer wouldn’t run. They would simply coincide, co-exist with you. There, away from the people, you could simply be.

You were a painter. You absolutely loved to paint. It was beyond those of Dezaltos, too. You painted foxes and cats and cacti, and your parents. You baked cookies with your mom. You watched old sci-fi movies with me. We would rip off the covers from the beds and we would chase each other like ghosts, wailing down the hall of our different homes we found ourselves in for various reasons. You liked rainbows and clouds. Everything has to be rainbows and clouds. You didn’t have a single monochrome item in your wardrobe. By five you had us dye your hair a spectrum of colors. You screeched with joy at the sight of it.

Talking just didn’t work well for us. We didn’t know your language yet, despite our trying. It all seems to change, like it was a living, breathing, evolving language. You didn’t like ours, I feel. I sense it was too lumpy, crude for you. But we didn’t really need words.

You were happiest in thunderstorms, when the clouds were closest to the world.

I remember the day when you came home and said you hated your name. I told you Azelreigh was a beautiful name. You said you only wanted to be called Azel. You said maybe the kids would stop laughing and teasing you. So, Azel it was.

And that was the first of the compromises. We lost “reigh” and didn’t look back. But it didn’t work. The kids still made fun of you every chance they had. They would call you “A-a-Azel.” They would call you an alien. They would call you a freak.

You wanted to dye your hair brown, then.

When the hair wasn’t enough, you changed your fashion to simple, yet accepted, clothes.

No matter how much you changed, I would drive through the school pick-up lane every day and find a crumpled up, tear-stricken daughter. The older you got, the crueler they became.

Your quest to become accepted then led to an obsession with fixing your speech. You became fixated with it. You would spend all day and all-night watching videos on how to talk better. How to assimilate. And it worked. Soon enough, you were speaking in clear, almost eloquent, sentences. The speech therapy did her damn job.

Something was starting to fade the more you became like them. A harsh, raw, wild light in your eye was fading into something found in school yearbook photos. It was still beautiful, but they were taking something from you, and we both saw it.

We were failing at what the angel from Dezaltos assigned us. Your splendorous, fractal light was fading through your quest to become accepted. Somehow, we let you feel that such a quest was necessary. You no longer found yourself in nature. You no longer laughed. You were living life under their umbrella.

So, we watched the forecast. We saw a doozy of a storm was coming. We pulled you out of school, and we went up to the nearby Mount Weld, not high by Dezaltosian standards, but high for suburban Midwest Americana. We all stood there as the rain covered us, and the thunder and the lightning danced with us. You closed your eyes, and you smiled, but you were also crying. You tried to pretend you weren’t, but you were.

We took a step back to watch you, we could see the rain beading off your invisible wings, wings that you were even hiding from yourself, and we had our own mourning, because we knew that they, those down there amongst the cul-de-sacs and bake sales, would never see the winged, spectral beauty, that was my daughter. They would only see an “other,” but for what we had, and what we could do, all our energy would be to fight their compromising ultimatums and find where you could fly.