Reminiscent of a Life Never Lived

It’s best not to look into the past when it’s the thing haunting you.

But that’s easier said than done.

The past is all we know. We don’t have memories of the future, and by the time we acknowledge the present it’s already behind us. The past is all we have to show us who we are, to draw wisdom and knowledge from, to help us see where we should be headed. The past is all we have.

So, what do you have left when you realize everything about your past is a complete lie?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The gas nozzle clicked, finished feeding my collection of parts I called a car. I called her Betty, actually. She’d been through a lot with me, and lived longer than everyone said she would. Way to prove ‘em wrong, Betty.

The old door protested in a high-pitched squeal as I dropped down into the carpeted seat that had lost much of its support.

“Alright, Betty, just a few more hours to go. You can do this.” I wasn’t sure if I was really telling her or me.

I started her up and pulled back out onto the empty, endless highway. All around me was flat land as far as the eye could see. A dead desert disturbed by man only by the road splitting it down the middle. I’d never been to this part of the country. I was used to wet swamps, big shade trees, and the river that ran behind the house I grew up in. Land teeming with life, even in places you don’t want it. I couldn’t count how many times I’d awoken to one small creature or another crawling on my bed. I would scream every time. Mama would come running and gently place the scared thing outside my window before telling me I needed to respect all the living things on our land because they had been there first.

“They’re bein’ kind enough to share their home with us, we’ve got to do the same,” she’d say.

“Yes, mama.”

But the next night I’d be screaming again, scared of yet another animal or insect that had made its way inside and she’d do it all over again.

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes and anger boiled up deep inside me. A guttural scream came from deep within my body as the tears overflowed onto my flushed cheeks. I choked on my tears and tried to clear them from my eyes as I drove. It was no use. I felt as if someone was stabbing me in the heart, over and over, and then watching as I bled out. The palm of my hand met the steering wheel with a force that should’ve been too much for the old thing. I hit it repeatedly until my energy and emotions drained out of me like water out of a bathtub. No matter how hard I tried, the past always had a way of sneaking up on me.

I looked over to the stained, worn passenger seat where a brown paper box sat. I wondered if it would be enough, or if they would even want it. I had assumed they would, but maybe they wouldn’t want anything at all from me. I had analyzed the email they had sent back to me countless times, trying to assess their emotions through a dim, unfeeling screen. The email hadn’t revealed anything about the sender’s feelings regarding the situation we were in. Though, to be fair, I wasn’t sure I even knew my own. There was no manual for this sort of thing.

I made it to my destination around midday when the sun was at the perfect height to beat down on me through Betty’s sunroof. Their house was bigger than I’d expected, bigger than I was used to. It was painted yellow with white trim, with a small red mailbox out front. The perfect little house. My legs felt weak as I stepped out of the car onto the gravel road, and my arms weaker still as I lifted the brown paper box out of the passenger seat. I had to remind myself this was a good thing; this was what I wanted.

I rang the doorbell gilded in fake gold and waited anxiously. A woman with my same bright, green eyes opened the door, and a man with my smile stood behind her. They welcomed me in graciously, offering me drinks and snacks.

These strangers were my parents, my biological parents, who I hadn’t known existed until a month ago. A month ago, when the mother who raised me, mama, had died and left all her secrets for me to go through, her biggest secret being me.

You see, on the same day that I was born, in the same hospital I was born in, mama gave birth. But the difference between me and her baby was I was born breathing, and her baby wasn’t. This devastated mama, she couldn’t comprehend grief of that magnitude, couldn’t accept what had happened. It broke her into a million pieces that could never be put back together. The day after I was born, the day after my mama lost the life she’d carried and loved for nine months, she went to the hospital’s nursery and decided I was, in fact, her baby. Overworked nurses in the understaffed hospital didn’t notice her take me from that nursery until she was long gone. And a new mother and father were left heartbroken, forced to leave as new parents with no baby.

And now, so many years later, I was found again.

We sat in the living room of my parents’ home, and I handed them the brown package I had so carefully packed back at the only home I knew. As they opened it and began sifting through the contents, tears quietly rolled down their wrinkled cheeks, and a small, sad smile came to their faces. I couldn’t help but smile too as tears pricked my eyes. My whole life was wrapped up in that little, brown box.

I narrated each photo, drawing, and memory of mine that they pulled from the box one by one, until several hours had passed that had seen so many tears and laughs from the three of us as we reminisced about our lives and a life never lived. With each memory we uncovered, each story of the lives we lived apart yet still managed to live joyously, I felt a small part of me begin to heal, a hole that, if not quite filled, at least felt to be a bit more patched up, a bit less empty and gaping than it had been when I had arrived. I gained a deeper realization of the unimaginable pain of losing a child as I spoke with my parents about losing me, and the hard, impenetrable shell that had encased my heart for the past month began to soften, and my anger at mama softened with it. What mama had done was inexcusable, but what she had gone through was inconceivable. I began to realize that anger at wrongs done against me, and done against these kind people sitting in front of me, could coexist with compassion for the woman who lost her baby and raised me. These feelings within me were not mutually exclusive, and that was okay. For the first time, I sat with my anger and with my compassion towards mama instead of forcing them to fight against one another. And in that moment, I felt okay again. In that moment, I felt peace.