Landmarks
I was ten years old and lying on the trampoline under the nighttime California sky. I was naturally a thinker, and I loved an early bedtime that allowed my imagination to run wild as I slowly drifted to sleep. I didn’t rest on the future-- to me, it was certain. I already knew that I was going to be married at 19 years old and have my first child at 20, just like my mom. Because of this plan, I chose to spend my dreaming on the past and present. To me, moments were landmarks, and landmarks were how we sorted our memories.
I wanted to remember the way the Big Dipper looked in the sky how I imagined it at that very moment. When the air became so polluted that you couldn’t see the sky, I wanted to be able to describe the stars to my children so they could see them too.. I wanted to remember what was most important to me, like the names of the raccoons I fed in the woods. The chirp of the little thresh that I’d saved from a bird trap my younger sister had created. The smile and giggle of the babies and the bleating of goats. Most importantly, I wanted to remember the feeling of when God crashed down the walls of my heart and gave me a new one. I wanted to remember becoming a Christian.
I didn’t want to remember the biggest landmark of that year-- when my parents divorced. That was a feeling better forgotten, yet in my attempt to banish it the memory dug itself deeper into my core. I smiled as the bats who slept in the roof of the house woke up as the sun went down. I decided I’d think of that instead.
“Lord I pray you day by day, help me to, in love, obey.” I whispered the little prayer that I’d written. To this day, it’s one of the only poems that I can still recall.
I smiled to myself as the bats woke up from their slumber and took to the sky. I willed them to fly away and never come back. If I could, I would do it just for fun and to know how it felt. To be old enough and strong enough to run away when the going got tough.
Right now, just about eight years later, I feel it. The feeling of wanting to run away just because I can. I’m eighteen, when the sun goes down and the night gets icy cold, I know that I can be like those bats and leave.
But even bats need each other. They need friends, family, their community. Each morning at the crack of dawn I would get up. I’d rush outside, sometimes too late, but occasionally just in time to see the bats return home. Still, my ten-year-old self wondered what it would be like to leave and never look back.
