Gone - part 3

It's strange, this new world I find myself in.  It's like the same, but so different.  So much of what I knew before is gone and so much new has come to take its place.  I don't even know how to describe what I'm feeling.  I try to express it with normal words, normal emotions, but how can words even exist for this?

My daughter who is posing as my sister works hard.  I'd worry about her if it didn't make her uncomfortable.  I wish she needed me, but it's I who need her.

It feels like all I do all day is sit around and watch TV.  I'm getting restless.  The programs intrigued me at first, but they're starting to get old now.  So much is the same as before, and the stuff that's different I don't care for all that much.  Practically speaking, it's good to know what's out there.  I just feel like I've seen enough for now.

I can at least take walks now.  Sarah's okay with that.  It would be more strange if I was never seen, she says.  This weekend we're even going shopping to get me my own wardrobe.  I've been borrowing her clothes so far.  My stuff was sold a long time ago, and it isn't "modern" enough anyway.

I do a little bit of reading, too.  Sarah got me some books from the library.  Fiction.  I want something nice to take my mind off things.  The TV reminds me of where I am more often than not.  With the books, I can go back several years, to how it was before.

One thing that did make me smile was realizing there's still a box of toys here that Sarah had growing up.  Some of them remember, but most of them were from after I was gone.  It's sad seeing how she grew up without me, but it's nice, too, to know that she was okay.  Or at least, that she was mostly okay.

Sarah still is okay.  I'm the one that's not.  I'm proud of who she is, who she's become, how she carried through.  I don't know that I could have done it if I were her.  A four year old losing her mother mysteriously, and almost losing her father too as he obsessed over finding the woman he loved?

Sarah told me how much Greg had loved me.  He didn't want to stop looking for me, but he had to.  Eventually there was no where else to look.  That's where I was:  no where.  I'm glad he moved on, and I'm never going to tell him I'm here.  Not ever.  It's enough that Sarah has to deal with.

I don't know what happened to me and I don't know why.  Sarah says she's glad I'm alive, but I wonder sometimes, in the dark, at night, if it would have been better if I had just stayed gone, if she had kept thinking I was dead.  The best thing, of course, would have been if I had never gone.  Sarah may be okay, but it was hard for her, and I don't know if she'll ever be great.  If I had been there for her, then her life would have been so much better.  I just wish I knew why this had happened, and why it happened to me.  The how, I accept I'll never know that.  I just wish that I knew why.

-----

It was hard enough having to lose mom once.  The first time it happened, I was too young to really understand.  It was more the aftermath that affected me.  But now, here I am, right in the thick of it.  And it's not like before.  Not just because I'm older, but also because she didn't just vanish.  This time, she was here, but unconscious.

Panic is an understatement.  I don't think my heart as ever beat so loudly.  When I called 9-1-1, I almost told them my mom needed help before I caught myself and remembered I had to claim she was my sister.  They rushed her to the emergency room where the doctor managed to get her stable.  He's hopeful.  He thinks she might wake up.  They haven't told me yet what's wrong with her.

-----

Tests, tests, and more tests.  I've never been so studied before.  I can't help but think that whatever is happening to me could have something to do with the fact that I apparently traveled 28 years through time, but I can't tell that to my doctor.  He'd transfer me to the loony bin.

-----

The doctor comes back and talks to me.  He looks somber.  It isn't the best news, but there is hope.  My mother has a brain tumor.  It's terminal if left untreated.  However, extremely promising treatments have been developed for this particular cancer in just the past five years.  Survival rates for those who undergo this particular treatment regiment are over 80%.  Ten years ago, this would have been a death sentence.  Now she has a real shot.

I almost pass out when I hear all of this.  Ten years ago?  What about 28 years ago?  My mother would have died within months of that fateful day she disappeared.  And now, here is a doctor telling me she's probably going to live?  This is crazy.  Could this... could this be the reason she was transported into the future?  Who did this?  What is going on?

Gone - part 2

It's probably at least 20 minutes before either of us speaks again.  Then it's my mom who opens her mouth.  She's probably less in shock than I am.  I've had 28 years of coping with her lose and now she's thrown back at me.  She's had barely 28 minutes to realize what's happened.

"So how are you doing?" she asks.

"Fine, I suppose, all things considered."

"What do you mean?"

I scoff.  "Well, my mom just walked back into my life after 28 years to me and 28 minutes to her."

"Well, I meant with life in general, other than with me," she says gently.

My eyes must be as big as grapefruits.  "You really want to know about my life without you?"

She frowns.  "I wish I had been there myself to see it all," she says.  "But this is the best I can get at this point."

I let out a deep sigh and lean back, but then wince in pain because my head that I fell on just touched the back of the chair.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" my mom asks, leaning forward.

"Yeah, mom, I'm fine," I say.  It feels weird saying "mom".  The lady my dad remarried wanted me to call her mom, but it always felt weird, especially since I was an adult by the time they married.  This is a different kind of weird.  The kind of weird you feel if something literally impossible is happening.  I have to be dreaming or dead or something.  The most logical explanation for all of this is that I'm about to wake up any minute.  There's been silence again while I'm thinking about all of this.  My mom breaks it.

"You must have a pretty decent job if you can afford the house all on your own."

"Well, dad paid off most of the mortgage before he gave it to me, so it wasn't so bad.  I wanted to pay him for it, but he said continuing to pay off the mortgage would be good enough for him."

"When was that?"

"Eight years ago.  Right after I graduated from college.  Dad and Marcy had tried living here, but Dad..." I sigh.  "He still remembered you in every hallway, so they had to move out.  He gave it to me because he needed to part with it but he couldn't really part with it."

"And you were okay, living here alone?  You didn't have the same... issues?"

I frown.  "I hate to break this to you, mom, but I barely remembered you.  I only recognized you today because dad used to sit up late staring at pictures of you, plus the fact that you said your name.  I don't think I would have ever thought it was you otherwise.  I mean, who would think their dead mother was bad and didn't look any older?"

There was another silence as neither of us knew what to say.  Then I went on, "I work as a paralegal.  I was pre-law, but didn't go on to become a lawyer.  It's decent pay, though no where close to what a lawyer makes."

"What made you decide to go pre-law?" my mom asks.

I stare at her for a moment before I say, a bit too rudely, "What do you think?"

She looks down at her hands, sighs, and then looks back up at me.  There are tears starting to form in her eyes.  I feel bad now.  "I'm so sorry sweetie," she says, fidgeting with her hands.  "I never meant for any of this to happen, I mean, me being gone for so long.  I loved you so much.  I just..."

I reach across the table and take her hand.  "I know," I say, softening my tone, "I just, I don't know what to do in this situation."

"Who would?" my mom says.  "I assume they haven't invented time travel yet."

I can't help but laugh at that.  "No, mom," I say, "they haven't."  I'm saying "mom" very consciously now, trying it out, hoping that it will stop sounding weird, but knowing I could never call her "mom" in public.  In public.  Dear Lord.  What are we going to do now?  How is she going to live in this world?

"So there's no explanation at all, no possible theory, on what happened to me then," my mom says.

"No," I say.  Then I smirk a little as I let go of her hand and say, "Unless God's involved somehow."

"Oh sweetheart," my mom says, "God wouldn't do something like this."  She's completely serious.

I scoff.  "It was a joke, mom," I say.  "God isn't real."

My mom frowns.  "I still believe in him," she says.

"Of course you do," I say.  "You didn't have your mother stolen from you when you were four years old."

"Sweetie..."

"I know, mom.  I'm sorry."

There's another silence and then I chuckle a little.

"What's so funny?" my mom asks, looking concerned.

I smile.  How can I not?  What's the other option in a situation like this.  "I'm older than you," I say.  "I'm older than my own mother."  And I burst out laughing.  I laugh so much that mom starts laughing too, and pretty soon we're crying, and then hugging and then I'm thinking again about how much my head hurts but how this can't possibly, any of it, be real.

-----

Well, when I wake up the next morning, mom's still around, so it might be more real than I thought.  She showed up on a Saturday, thank goodness, so we have a whole two days to figure out what to do with her before I go back to work.  We decide to approach this practically and have her pretend to be my sister.  But she has no identification other than a social security number that puts her at age 57, so we have to think a bit on what to do about that.  Finally I decide to just screw it and deal with the need for identification when it comes up.  As long as she doesn't get pulled over by a cop, we'll be fine, and I'm sure as hell not letting her drive anywhere anyway.

I tell her to stay home and watch TV while I'm at work.  Maybe she can get caught up on all the stuff she's missed over the past 28 years.  Maybe she'll enjoy it.  Or maybe it will just make her cry.

Gone - part 1

When I was very young, just four years old, my mother disappeared.  Now, when I say disappeared, I mean disappeared, as in gone without a trace.  She tucked me in, got into bed with my father, and when he and I woke up in the morning, she was no where to be seen.  Every stitch of clothing she owned was still there in the closet, other than the nightgown she had been wearing.  No bags were missing.  The car was still in the garage.  The doors were all locked, and there was no sign of a struggle or any forced entry.  My father didn't feel like he had been drugged.  We both woke up feeling perfectly fine, until we realized mom wasn't in the kitchen making breakfast.  Mom wasn't anywhere.  She was just gone.

This whole incident is just on the edge of my memory, but my father, of course, remembers it all vividly, even to this day.  How could he forget?  The love of his life just went up in a puff of smoke, except there wasn't even any smoke to be seen.

It happened before the dawn of the cell phone, so there was no reliable way to try to reach her if she was somehow out somewhere.  My dad tried calling neighbors, friends, relatives, anyone he could think of who might possibly have been contacted by her.  After two hours of this, he called the police, who politely told him it was too soon to really consider it a missing person case.  When he yelled at them that even all of her shoes were still here, as were her purse, keys, and all other personal effects, they decided to make a slight exception.

The cops were there within four hours of the discovery that mom was missing, and there was very little they could do.  I remember how big they looked and thinking how they were going to bring my mommy home.  They weren't really that big and they didn't bring my mommy home either.  No one brought her home.  There was no contact from anyone.  There were no demands.  There was no confused phone call from an amnesiac.  There was no blood, no hair, no body.  Nothing.  She was just utterly and completely gone.

The cops looked for weeks before they gave up.  My father went on for months trying to find anything about what had happened.  He dug back through his memory, scouring it for any clue as to where she might have gone or who she might have talked to.  There was nothing, and there was no one.  After a couple years past, even he gave up.  He was sad, depressed even, for a very long time, but eventually he managed to move on.

I don't know if being young made it easier or harder on me.  It was certainly strange going to my first day of kindergarten and not having a mother to give me a hug and a kiss good-bye.  My father did the best he could, but he was really a pretty crappy parent for those first few years, during that time when he was still looking for her.  It wasn't until he gave up on her that he turned his attention to me and realized that I was hurting, too.

That was when the years of counseling started.  I was a smart kid, so I'm told, but I had significant behavioral problems in school.  Who could blame me?  At first, I had significant behavior problems in the counselor's office as well, but they are professionals, and I didn't know enough to try to trick them into thinking I was okay when I wasn't.  They knew I wasn't okay.  They couldn't fix me completely, but at least they could make me a little better.  And as I grew older, I learned how to pretend I was okay even when I wasn't.  By the time I entered high school, I was just the same as any other kid being raised by a single parent.  No one even knew how strange my mom's disappearance had been.  I just told them all that she was dead.

So that was how I lived my life, being as normal as I could by more or less blocking out the fact that my mom was just gone.  I had dealt with all that crap when I was young and now it didn't have to bother me anymore.  I accepted that my life had been made different from everyone else's and with that acceptance, I could pretend it wasn't that different at all.  I'm not sure if this is exactly how my counselors had wanted me to cope, but it worked for me so it was what I went with.

And now here I am, 28 years after that fateful night, staring right into the face of someone I've been claiming as dead since I was old enough to know to do so.  And I have no idea what to say.

----------------

It had been a night just like any other.  I had tucked my little girl into bed, climbed in with my husband, turned off the light, and fallen asleep.  When I woke up in the morning, I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong.  My husband wasn't there, the light wouldn't turn on, and there was a thin layer of dust over everything.  I made my way out to the kitchen where the lights wouldn't turn on there either, the fridge was empty, and one of the windows was even broken.  My daughter's room:  nothing.  Everything was dark:  in the house and outside the house as well.  Not knowing what else to do, I went to the front door and opened it.

The beam of light that hit me was so bright that I was forced to close my eyes.  When I opened them again, I was standing on the outside of the front door with my hand still on the handle.  It was day time.  I turned the handle and nothing happened.  Then, I heard a voice behind me say, "Excuse me, can I help you?"

I turned and saw a woman, about my own age, whom I had never seen before holding a bag of groceries and walking towards my front door.

"I uh, I seem to have locked myself out," I said nervously, not sure what else to say.

"Uh..."  The woman stared at me for a moment and then said, "I'm sorry, but this is my house."

I looked around.  No, this was definitely my house, though the paint job looked a lot nicer that I thought it did.  "I don't think so..."

The woman sighed and took a step towards me.  "Look, this is my house," she said.  Then she reached into her pocket and took out a strange, gray, thin brick type device.  "Listen, is there someone I can call who can come get you?"

I was getting irritated now.  "The man you would call would be inside that house!"  I pointed behind me.  "My husband, Gregory Addams.  I'm Amanda Addams, and this is my home!"

The woman's eyes grew wide at that.  She dropped the grocery bag and the strange device and said just one word:  "Mom?"  And then she passed out.

----------------

So here we are, sitting at the kitchen table that once was hers and now is my own, an ice pack on the back of my head, staring at one another, neither one of us having any clue what to say.  I mean, this is impossible.  This has to be a trick.  This woman is a con artist or something.  I don't know what she's after, but she's after something.  She has to be.  Yet somehow, I know this is really her.  Even though she doesn't look like she's aged a day, this has to be my mom.  For one thing, she's wearing the nightgown we never found and she's barefoot.  For another, well, somehow I just know.

Finally, she speaks.  "So tell me again, what year is it?"

"It's 2016," I tell her.  "You've been gone for 28 years."

"But I just went to bed and woke up," she says.

I shake my head, still in shock and disbelief, "Well not to us you didn't."

"Your father is he..."

"He's fine.  Well, as fine as he can be considering.  But, mom, I don't know if you should see him.  He's remarried now.  Has been for 13 years."

"Greg is..."

"I'm sorry, Mom."

She shakes her head.  "I know, I'm just."  She sighs, looks down, and then looks back at me.  "You're four years old," she says.

"Not anymore."

"I just tucked you in last night."

"Last night 28 years ago."

"So you're..."

"Thirty-two, yup."

"And not married?"

I can't help but smile just a little at that.  "Not all women get married," I say.  "Even back in your day, that was true."

"Yes, I know," she says, flustered, "I just... what do you say to a daughter who was four years old yesterday and is thirty-two today."

"I don't know."

"How did this happen?"

"I don't know."

"Why did this happen?"

"I don't know."

We're silent again after that.  What do you do in a situation like this?  What can you do?  To whom can you turn?  There is literally no one else in the universe who has experienced this before.  Not yet, anyway.

Eyes

When I would look into his eyes and he would look away, I always thought it was just because he was shy, or possibly because I was his first true love.  I never in a million years would have imagined that it was because our whole relationship was a lie.  I loved him so much.  I just assumed that he loved me that much, too.  His words said it all the time, even if his eyes didn't.  I should have known it was too good to be true.

We met in college, in a study group.  I was actually dating his roommate at the time, but I never expected that to go much of anywhere.  I was young and still figuring out what I wanted.  I liked his roommate because he was outgoing and fun.  I liked him because he was quiet and thoughtful.  Back then, he would look at me, when he thought I wasn't looking back.  Whenever he noticed that I had noticed, he would immediately look away.  If he had looked back again after that, he would have seen me smile.

He was shy; that part was not a lie.  At least I don't think it was.  I was sure he wanted to ask me out, but he never did, even months after his roommate and I broke up.  It was almost summer before I finally asked him if he'd like to go out on a date.  He just said, "If you'd like to."  That was the beginning of the end.

It took some time for him to come out of his shell, but it turned out he was actually pretty funny, and really smart.  I already knew he was smart.  He was the top kid in our class.  Later on, I asked him on more than one occasion why he settled for a crap school like the one we were going to.  He told me I shouldn't call it that and if it was a crap school for him it was a crap school for me to.  I told him that we both knew that wasn't true, he was capable of way more than I was.  He tried to protest, but he couldn't, not really.  He was smarter than me.  We both knew it.

I was the social one, though.  I was the one with the people skills.  I thought he was lacking in that area.  I tried to help him.  I'm not always sure he totally appreciated it.  It's very possible that in trying to help him, I drove him further away.

I was pretty.  I think that's the main thing that drew him to me.  He didn't know me that well when I first caught him looking at me.  He knew me really well by the time he stopped looking.

If I look back, I'm sure I should have seen it all coming.  He was smart, but he wasn't the boyfriend I wanted him to be.  He wasn't what I needed him to be.  Sometimes, I think he was too smart.

He never demanded anything of me.  He was always kind.  It wasn't about that.  It was simply that he didn't love me.  He wanted to be with me, be my friend, support me.  He was always telling me to think more of myself, to take what I deserved, to act the way I talked.  I think I was more like a student to him than a lover.  He never even asked to kiss me.  I kissed him.  He never even asked to stay over.  I invited him in.  I loved him so much, and now I don't even know why.

Most of what I say doesn't make sense.  That happens at the end, when things have unraveled.  I should have known before that he never really loved me.  It shouldn't have taken him telling me for me to realize it.  It sucks that when I finally got through to him, when I finally convinced him to be more open and vocal about his feelings, that was what came out.  In my success, I lost him.  Part of me wishes I had never succeeded.

One good thing came from all of this, though.  I realized that I don't need him.  I don't need anyone.  I am smart enough.  I am strong enough.  I can make it on my own.  When I look in the mirror, I see fire in my own eyes, but it isn't hatred or anger.  I think if I ever run into him again, I'll thank him.  I'll thank him for resisting me for so long, but in the end showing me that he didn't complete me.  I could never hate him, though.  I think I'll always love him.  Even though he didn't love me.

There was just something about him, when I did manage to look into his eyes, something that said there was more to him, that he knew something I didn't.  Maybe it was the fact that he didn't love me.  Maybe it was something I'll never know.  There's no point in wondering now.  We're through, and it's time for me to move on with my life.

--------

I hate that we're through.  I hate that it's over.  I would give anything to go back to how it was.  Well, anything except sacrificing who she could be.  That's why it's over:  because I didn't want to sacrifice who she could be.

She cared so much.  She cared too much.  She cared too much about me.  When she looked at me, I saw in her eyes how much she thought she needed me.  I felt in my soul that she didn't need me at all.  As long as I was around, she would always compare herself to me.  She would always think she was smarter than me.  She would always be wrong.

I loved her so much.  That was why I had to finally tell her that I didn't.

I had to let her go.

I hope she never understands what I've done.  I hope she can close her eyes and remain blind to this one thing so that her eyes can be open to so much else.

She's better off without me.  She's strong.  She wouldn't have realized that with me around.  She thought her only strength was in helping me.  She's strong for herself.  I see it in her eyes.  Without me, she truly has the potential to change the world.

Someday, their eyes will be on her, and I'll just be a memory, if even that.  I'll fade.  I have to.  We'll go back to the days where I see her and she doesn't see me.  And I won't have to look away to see her smile.

Miracles

When we are very young, children, we look at everything with a sense of awe and wonder.  The world is beautiful and strange.  Because we do not understand it, everything is a miracle.  Lightning bugs, the wind, fireworks, snow, bubbly soda are all amazing.

As we grow older, we start to understand how things really are.  We learn about physics, chemistry, biology.  Science takes away the mystery and fills us with understanding instead.  The miracles are gone.  

We think that when we grow up and understand how things are, they become less amazing.  But what we don't understand is that understanding these things is more amazing than the things themselves.

When we get older still, we realize that understanding does not replace miracles, but is a miracle in and of itself.  How can there be such well-defined rules for how things work?  And who are we to have figured all of this out?

Some might say this is not a miracle, but just the way things are.  But can't "the way things are" still be miraculous?  If not miraculous, can it at least be wonderful?

Miracles are all around you.  What you view as a miracle might change as you grow older, but the miracles don't go away; they just shift in focus.  As we view things from farther and farther away, from the lens of more and more years of experience, we see there is even more to what we thought we knew than we could have ever imagined.  

The painting is so much more beautiful and so much more awe-inspiring the more and more we see of it.  And this painting, this thing we call life, or existence, is the greatest miracle of all.

Names

What's in a name?  A life?  A soul?

I've had so many over the years.  Anna, Margaret, Mary, Helen, Dorothy, Betty, Barbara, Mary, Susan, Lisa, Jennifer, Ashley.  Each sounded nice at the time.  Each wears thin after not too long.  Every 10 years or so, I switch to what seems to be a popular name at the time.  It's been so long, there have been so many names, that I don't even remember the one I was born with.  It could be Eve for all I know.

Years.  Hundreds and hundreds of years.  Sometimes I wonder why I go on.  Every 10 years, dying and being reborn.  Same face, subtle differences.  New town, but each place the same as before.  Nothing really changes.

I live because that's what you do.  That's what you do in this world.  You just live for as long as you can.  That's the rule.  So if I can live forever, why wouldn't I?

If I ever do die, no one will know who I really was, least of all me.

I don't have to be alone.  There are others like me.  I know that.  I could find them if I wanted to.  But I don't want to.  And I don't want to be found.

Once I thought it would be fun, changing my identity, becoming someone new.  Now I realize it's just a chore, and it doesn't really make you new.  Not at all.  You can try to take on a new personality, have a new outlook, think of it all as an act, a play, a game.  After the first hundred years or so, it gets old.

I used to try to love.  I used to even love mortals.  But then I realized I was jealous.  I was jealous of how they could grow up and grow old and move on.  If I told any of them what I was, they would want to be like me.  They would want to make them like me.  That is something I will never do again.

Andrew, James, Christian, Alexander.  They're long forgotten now.  Everyone of them dead and buried.  I remember their names.  I have no idea who I was at the time I knew them, but their memories live on with me stronger than the memories of myself.  Their names meant something.  Their names were their lives.  Their names came with souls.

My soul is gone.  I used to tell myself I still had it, buried somewhere inside me, but I know now that was just a lie, a story I told myself.  It was about as real as other people believe creatures like me to be.

It's funny how what's real changes with what you actually know.  I'm a fear, a fantasy, a fable to most.  I know that what's real to them can never be real to me, ever again.

The most real thing about me is the name I currently go by, and that can never last.

So why do I do it?  Why do I keep going on?  I wouldn't have to kill myself.  I could just show them, show the world, what I really am.  Someone would end me, whether someone like me or someone afraid of me.  Someone would put this all to an end.

Unless they are all too afraid.

They don't realize that I'm the one who is afraid; afraid that I will truly never die, that my names will go on forever.

Hannah, Sophia, Emma, blah, blah, blah.  Who knows what my name will be a hundred years from now.  Maybe I'll be back to Mary by then.  Whatever my name is, nothing will have changed, not really.  I'll still be alone, by choice.  I'll refuse to love, by choice.  I'll have a different name, by choice.  And my soul will still be gone, not by choice.

A name.  What's in a name?  It's nothing; it's everything.  It's the only thing I can control.  It's the only thing I have left.