Testimony of the Living, Pt. IX
We drove for a long time. After three days, we came across a town called Pioneer Oaks in Oregon; Autumn said the name suited us, so we stayed. Now, after living here for almost a decade, you could never tell by looking at us that we’d been raised amongst shadows. You’d never guess that the sole goal of the first eighteen years of our lives had been to make it here.
We still gather at each other’s houses like we did when we were kids. At least once a week, we find ourselves together at someone’s kitchen table, talking about the past, present and future. Every once in a while we reflect on the night we left. None of my friends were gifted a final conversation with their parents the way I was. Jonah and Easton didn’t even leave a note. Asher left a painting he had spent all of senior year creating. It was a painting of Finder’s Point; everything in black and white except our blue van and a road leading out of town. Autumn said she had left a note, but she had never told anyone what she had written.
Then one night she showed me a copy. She said I deserved to read it, claiming I had helped her find the right words. She handed me a notebook and I found myself having a strange moment of deja vu when I looked down to see an extended version of the poem she had shown me on the school bus years ago.
Bullets fall from the sky killing
shadows with no need for sunlight
who are unaware of the battlefield
they are tethered to, who are
unaware that they are casualties
of a war that is not over.
But though they try, these soldiers
from the sky, they cannot find
a way to kill the second sun
that lives inside me. Their clouds
cannot take away the light
that’s always kept me alive.
You have known all along
that I had something to share
with anyone whose eyes or ears
I could capture. The words are calling
and I must go.
She told me that underneath the poem she had signed her name. And she had left the note atop a pile of every other poem and essay and story that she had ever written during our time in Finder’s Point.
“They didn’t like the first essay I showed them,” she said. “But I thought that maybe, without me there, they’d want to look at my other stuff. I thought maybe my absence could breed an appreciation that my presence never managed.”
Her comment made me wonder if any of our parents’ lives had changed for the better after we left.
Our life in Pioneer Oaks is good. Each of my friends is able to live out the great potentials that have always existed within them. And I am finally able to step into the light of the real world without fear of becoming the shadows I grew up watching. I have learned what my mom meant when she told me to not be afraid.
And a couple years after we moved here, through watching people who had grown up — not with the lack of emotion I had, but with a confidence in a limitless and passionate future — I learned what look had been on my mom’s face that last night. It had been the look that other mothers give their sons and daughters when they are going to college, or getting married, or achieving other lifelong dreams. It was a look that says, “I know I am losing you, but this is what I have been working toward your whole life.” It was a look that sees this new phase as a good thing.
It was a look infused with pride.
We created lives in Pioneer Oaks that could not have happened in Finder’s Point. We found careers, we found love, we found a sense of belonging. And each April we renewed our old vow to stay alive, as well as promising to never take for granted what we had found in this new place.
And we kept repeating those vows, in every beat of our hearts, for the rest of our lives.
Originally published in The Index, Feb. 2019
Photo by Xavier Foucrier on Unsplash
