One. Three. Five… She was carefully placing her feet. Eleven… Fifteen. Seventeen… So as not to step on the lines that were crisscrossing the tiled kitchen floor. Nineteen. This is where it stops.
She was alone in the house, but almost as much effort went into disguising her movements as when other people were around. She couldn’t rationalize this for everybody else the same way she did it for herself. They wouldn’t understand. They didn’t know. It was a dance with the universe, a risky salsa, in which one false move would inevitably lead to something terrible. She knew not what it was, but the certainty of it happening was more prevailing and overwhelming than anything else around or within her.
Nineteen. Good enough. She pulled out a chair and gingerly sat on its calming wooden surface. The sinuous lines running through it, the unpredictable fibers of which it was made appeared random, and that invariably invoked a kind of serenity in her.
She won’t have to do it anymore, today is a special day, and only because of that – one, two, three seconds… enough. She glanced at her hands. Steady. Beautiful long fingers, and an array of small iridescent beads shining against the brown of her skin, giving her palms that familiar slippery feeling.
She took a breath and picked up a folded piece of paper from the table. It was pleasantly dry, with a faded yellow tint, and smelled of the past. Her sister had found it two days ago, when moving some old furniture.
She thought about this one clue she had in her hands. How many pages like this would it take to redeem the twenty-seven years that slipped through her fingers no matter how tightly she clutched her fists? Three years wasn’t enough. Nineteen? Not even twenty-seven.
She’d heard a lot in these three years after the car accident. She had been introduced to herself, the kind of person she used to be but that often still felt like a stranger to her. She had to learn who her family was, who she could trust, who she loved and who cared about her. And while she felt that three years was enough to almost fully reconnect with others, she couldn’t say that about reconnecting with herself. It was interesting to listen to the stories about a curious little girl, then a feisty teenager, then a successful woman. But it never felt like these stories were about her, they were about someone else, a different person with a different life that everyone was trying so hard to impress upon her.
Other people have flashbacks. It may take a while, but they begin to remember something, at least one or two images come to them in their sleep. She, however, was blank.
Her two sisters made it their goal to alleviate her situation as well as they could. During the first year after the accident, soon after she recovered, they would rush her to the therapy sessions every Tuesday and Friday after work. It didn’t amount to much. What the therapist soon discovered to her surprise was that she had OCD. She didn’t even have to say much about the alarming premonitions that washed over her with militant regularity. The doctor was a professional in his field and seemed to see through her. Yet what he didn’t see was that none of his methods really helped.
Soon she stopped cooperating, and decided not to take any medication since she believed that it was only through her sheer willpower that she could truly defeat it. It took her another several months to convince both her sisters and the doctor that he had done all he could and that she could stop attending the sessions. Her sisters never learned she had OCD and chalked up her unusual behavior to her being amnesiac, a state they didn’t clearly understand.
Then her sisters became adamant about making her go to church every Sunday (for some reason she was averse to the idea for most of the first year which only made her sisters pray harder). They kept telling her how much she loved the Lord and gospel music when she was a child and how she got saved at the age of twelve. She wasn’t sure any of that was about her, but eventually she resigned and decided to go to church.
She remembered the first time she entered the church. As she walked through the door into a hall with a small stage, a pulpit and a cross hung on the wall behind it, the first thing she thought about was where she had to sit. They came early and there were quite a few seats available. Three from the right, six from the left; second row, fifth row… Then she decided that the best seat would be number seven if you start counting from the right side in the eights row.
After the collections had been made, and the pastor gave a sermon, something about the meaning of the Beatitudes, the choir got on the stage, and everybody stood up and started clapping. People clapped until their palms were sore and didn’t stop even after that. When the music faded away and it was time to pray some started speaking in tongues, others got on their knees. She wasn’t sure she felt the same way as most other people in the church. But it felt comforting. There was something in the air, something that she and everybody else shared. She could almost start crying, but didn’t. She also thought that maybe it was the same force that made them all do what they were doing that also kept her alert during the day to all the patterns and signs, the obvious omens of what could happen that only she could understand.
She would pray a lot since that day. Several times a day. Sometimes several times an hour. She would count the steps of the porch, skipping the odd ones on even days, and the even ones on odd days. She was wary not to let others see her patterns or let them decipher her numbers. She prayed that she would succeed in it, and she prayed to be delivered from this burden. The time went by, and she prayed. And she never missed church.
Life was beginning to look up for her family. Her eldest sister got a new job, and with more money coming in they decided to renovate the house. By now they had already removed almost every piece of old furniture they had. After much deliberation they had made a decision not to keep the wardrobe that belonged to their mother when she was alive. When it had been removed her sister found a folded piece of paper on the floor where the wardrobe used to stand. The next day she gave it to her with a wistful smile, and said that the message was addressed to her.
She was not sure what this relic could mean, obviously coming from the distant past that she knew so little about. She had been putting it off, the moment when she would read it, but now the anticipation overpowered her. She was holding it in her hands. She put it down and picked it up again.
The clock on the wall behind her was methodically ticking away. She threw a cautious glance at it. 2:55 PM. The second hand was gliding across the white background of the clock face, always moving forward and never looking back. Her mind impulsively concocted another goal: she had to finish reading before it strikes 3 PM, or…
After carefully unfolding it and inhaling the little pieces of dust that were an inevitable companion to the message, she saw large wavering handwriting. The rim of the page was decorated with a think curvy band of washed-out blue color. And from the upper-hand corner, like a dim light that someone had forgotten to turn off, shone the happy old sun. She smiled. She fidgeted in the chair a little and began to read.
Dear future Kayla,
How are you? What are you doing now? I don’t wont to forget congradulations on finishing high school! You’re very old now maybe 18 or even 20. Maybe you even forget things alredy like grandma. I can remind you I’ll tell you what I like. I hope you still love dogs. Because I LOVE them! Yesterday me and my mama saw a big dog in the street, I wonted to pet it and mama chased it away. I wish we take it home but mama says it’s filthy. I don’t think so. Mama buyed a desk for me for school I like it. I keep all my drawings on it and Mimi and Mini. I am their boss but we are also friends. You still wotch reading rainbow? You’re big now. Jasmine is big alredy too and she stoped wotching it. She says adults don’t wotch reading rainbow. But you’re not like that. I think you still wotch it right?
I gota go have dinner now. Bye! Good luck!
I forgot to ask what songs you like now? You can’t rite me back of corse if you don’t have a time mashin but you can just say. I love love will be rite here, have no fear. Mama says only good songs are songs we sing for the Lord. I’m sure you love Jesus. He died for us mama says becos he really loved us you know. I think you’re a doctor or a teacher I’m not sure which because right now I want to be both. Maybe you are both. I need to ask but don’t tell mom. Are you married to Bobby from third grade? I think I like him but we don’t talk. He thinks he’s too old like an adult. But I don’t think so. I hope you are happy and pretty with braids! I drawed the sun here for you so you smile when you see it!
With love Kayla
Kayla may not have become a doctor or a teacher, or both. At least not yet. And she didn’t remember what ‘Reading Rainbow’ was all about. And of course she wasn’t married to Bobby. But there was one thing that Kayla was confident about like she had never been before in her life. This letter, written in big shaky childish letters, was about her. Every word of this story meant much more to her than a lifetime of other people telling her who she used to be. For the first time she felt that she knew herself.
She glanced at her hands. Steady. Beautiful long fingers, and the gentle shining lines of the drying tears against the brown of her skin. She put down the letter and stepped on the floor. Her foot landed right on the line that had separated one tile from another as an insurmountable gulf of anguish. She had a look at the clock. 3:05 PM. She smiled and walked on. Saved. Kyla thought about it a little – she didn’t need to go to church anymore. That was all it took to stop dancing with the universe.
