The author of this essay blinks against a sudden deluge of color. Just a moment ago she was typing at her kitchen table, but now she finds herself in a garishly bright living room. Turquoise shag carpet undulates across the floor to a wall bursting with flowering trees, a footbridge over a bubbling stream, a meadow of waving grasses. It is not so much a scene as an explosion of Jolly Rancher flavors—watermelon and pink lemonade and sour apple and cherry and blue raspberry. Though it looks like a mural, she remembers it is actually the recycled paper of a stage set, adhered to the wall in pride of place. A woodburning stove sits in the room’s corner, among chairs and a sofa that are nondescript with blurred memory, eclipsed by the splendor of wall and floor and spread thin across the passage of twenty-three years. 

Nestled into the carpet is a girl, twelve or thirteen, lashed to the punishing saddle of early puberty. As she leans over a sketchbook, her lips are parted to reveal a set of shockingly bad teeth. They sit in her mouth like a deck of poorly shuffled cards. She passes her tongue over them unconsciously, then looks up to see who has joined her.

“You again!” she yelps, not unwelcomingly. She gives the author a shy, close-mouthed smile.

The author is startled but not entirely surprised to find herself in her own childhood. It has happened once before, a visit to her past self, by means nebulous and mostly undefined. 

“Hey,” she greets the girl, “you remember me?”

“Um, yeah,” the girl says with a discrete eye roll, “like I would forget a magical visit from my grown-up self.” She is trying out sarcasm and it fits her like a borrowed dress, which is to say, unflatteringly. 

“Well, you were only eight last time. And it felt sort of made up, right? Especially since we went into that dream together.”

“The dream where we grew into giants and I stomped a nightmare wolf and its disgusting guts squished out and got in between my toes because you didn’t think to give me shoes? No, I haven’t forgotten.” She folds her legs into a more comfortable position, resting her chin on her knees. “It was actually pretty cool,” she admits with a little shrug.

The author grins. “I thought so too. That wolf was a menace; it deserved to get squished. Has it helped with your nightmares?”

“Uh-huh. Pretty much. I had the dream a few more times but it wasn’t a nightmare anymore. I didn’t feel so terrified.” 

“I’m really glad to hear that. And how are things for you now? I have to say, this house is pretty wild.”

“It’s ok,” the girl says. She’s studying the shag carpet with a fixed gaze, fingers carding the long strands as though petting a cat. “I like this house better than the others. It's nice to have my own room.” Her eyes dart up to the author’s for a moment, then dance away again, to the painted trees, her sketchbook, her toes.

The author watches. She waits. The girl is increasingly restless. A range of emotions flicker across her face: worry, guilt, nervousness, a minnow of excitement. Weariness radiates from her like the scribbly lines of stink around that one comic-strip character.

“You look sad,” the author comments, gently.

“I’m ok!” It’s a reflexive response, aggressively cheerful.

“It’s ok to not be ok, though.” Still gentle.

There is a subject they are circling. They both think of it in capitals. It is the first Definitive Sorrow of their life. It goes like this:

A family living abroad. The parents doing the Lord’s work in an underdeveloped country. Three sisters living a postcard-perfect childhood: frolicking on pristine beaches, climbing tropical fruit trees, dreaming beneath mosquito net canopies. Then: civil unrest. Reports of roadblocks, rumors of murder and rape. The family stays. How bad can it get? A coup. Emergency orders from the embassy. Military boats and airplanes deployed to retrieve expatriates. The parents make preparation to bunker down and then receive reports of further, previously unsuspected danger and change their minds. The family has an afternoon to pack. They are allotted two suitcases and five backpacks. The rest is left behind. They wait in the airport for most of a day while handfuls of expats are funneled into military transport aircraft and shuttled across the ocean to the closest developed nation. Eventually it is the family’s turn. They take their place on the plane, where each seatbelt is a harness, descending over both shoulders like an infant car seat. The sisters are given souvenir stickers. The flight is much louder than a commercial airplane. Soon it is over. The family are released into a special customs line. They are not refugees because the home they were extracted from was not legally theirs. There is no term for what they are now, other than displaced. The author, at twelve years old, is thrilled to be living this adventure. 

The family drifts down a hall and out through international arrivals, towing their two suitcases and five backpacks. A reporter from a local newspaper takes their picture. They all smile. A middle-aged couple approaches the parents. They have heard of the political strife and are there as Good Samaritans to offer the family shelter in their home for the night. The family has never met these people before, but they profess to be Christians, so the parents say sure. They own a Christian bookstore, and their house looks the part. It is packed with teddy bears and commercialized spirituality—footprints in the sand, etc. They give the sisters WWJD bracelets and colorful pencils and bookmarks with inspirational quotes. The wife serves pavlova for dessert. The author tries a bite, but the sugar is exquisitely painful to the blisters blanketing her tongue, blisters that stumped Red Cross medics earlier that evening. Viral infection, they shrugged. 

The next day the family boards another flight to a different city to meet their colleagues. Of their missionary community, the author’s family was the only one to receive the privilege of air travel. The rest have been aboard a ship for many days. The boat disgorges her friends two days after her family arrived in their plane. They all stay in a hotel together. The missions organization sends a counselor to debrief the group in one mass session. Her friends all weep. She does not. The boat was a wretched experience, from what she is told. Perhaps this is why she feels unaffected by the sadness that wracks her friends. To the author, this feels like a grand vacation. They go to the mall, to the zoo, on long scenic drives. They visit a 50’s diner and order burgers and milkshakes and flip through the jukebox selections looking for songs they know but finding none they recognize (they only listen to Christian music). She buys a navy blue bucket hat and wears it everywhere. She is living her best life, though that phrase won’t be invented for twenty years.

Then: one by one, her friends’ families leave. Back to their home countries. America, Australia. Her family is the only one left in the hotel. Her parents want to stay nearby. They are not due back to their passport country for another two and half years, and they expect this will all blow over in a few months. They accept a three month assignment as teachers in a missionary training program in an adjacent country and the family boards a commercial airplane and then a prop plane and then finally a truck that drives them up a bumpy mountain. Their new accommodations are cramped and loud, right across from the communal cafeteria. The author turns thirteen. She gets bangs. Her previously straight hair turns wavy, but not in the cute way. She gets migraine headaches. She gets pimples inside her nostrils. She gets recurring boils that migrate from armpits to shins and back again, a new one cropping up just as the previous one is almost healed. Her parents try every remedy: ointments and antibiotics and even the skin of a fresh papaya, applied directly to the open sore. Nothing works. In desperation, her mother starts her on an extensive, expensive regimen of vitamins. The author learns to stack five, six, seven pills and swallow them all in one go. It saves time. She is practical like that.

The three month assignment is completed. The conflict continues. The family moves to another missionary community, a small town in the highlands of the country they’ve been staying in. They request short term housing, expecting to receive permission to return to their own country at any time. They do this over and over again. Seven houses in eight months. The garish house is just the second. The sisters start school in the middle of term. The author contracts a respiratory infection with a lingering cough. The doctor calls it asthma. Shrug. She acquires an inhaler. She gets to sit out of PE and field day. Small mercies. Her classmates have known each other since before kindergarten. Exactly none of them are curious about why she is suddenly there. The answer burns in her, waiting for someone to ask. This doesn’t feel like an adventure anymore. It feels like a trick. 

The Evacuation. 

That’s what they call it, this thing they are not talking about. 

“I can see that you’re not ok,” the author says. “Will you tell me about it?”

And the girl looks at once miserable and euphoric. Someone has finally asked. “I’m not even crying,” she says. “How can you tell?”

“Crying isn’t the only way to be sad.”

“I wish I could cry, though.”

“Me too. We’re still working on that.”

Here the author pauses. The portion of her brain that is composing this narrative is stuck. It was more straightforward last time, when she was writing about fear. What is the fear? Wolf. How to confront fear? Enter nightmare, squish wolf. Done. 

Now she is writing about trauma, a real event (the first of many) that cannot be altered, and she is struck dumb by the same confounding question that taunted her throughout her adolescence and beyond: how does one walk away from an earthquake when one is still buried in the rubble? And of course, the answer is: one must dig oneself out. 

But god, it is filthy, excruciating work, and one gets so weary of dirt and ash and chunks of concrete and shattered china and rebar and one's own piss and shit and blood, as one labors for endless hours to shift just a teaspoon’s worth of detritus from one’s eyes in order to see the actual mess one is dealing with, and—no—no!—one realizes, the actual mess is far too much for one person alone, so is there even a point in trying at all? One thinks not. 

One learns to dissociate from one’s reality, which is, one’s therapist will tell them later, the brain’s elegant solution for keeping one safe through experiences too difficult and painful to comprehend in the moment. One becomes comfortable in one’s den of rubble and makes a home for oneself there, finding that, in fact, one can ride out multiple earthquakes from this cozy hole, and if the caved-in walls and piled-up beams settle closer and the concrete dust multiplies, what of it? It is simply life, one understands. Life is hard and bad things happen and one deals with it as best they can. 

But, one wonders, if one had the opportunity to visit one’s childhood self, fresh buried and awash with bewildered sorrow, what would one say? Could one offer comfort? Is there solace to be had? The author doesn’t know, but she is here and she must try. She turns to the girl. 

“I’ve had a long time to think about all of this. Here’s what I know: you’ve been very brave this past year. You’re a helpful oldest sister and you have a good attitude for Mom and Dad, and even all the moving feels kind of normal, right, because we’ve always moved every few months. But you’ve also been sick a lot this year.”

The girl nods.

“Here’s the thing. Your life was already so unusual before The Evacuation that your built-in detector for knowing whether something is a Big Deal or Not a Big Deal is all out of whack. It’s like your sensitivity settings are turned way down. It’s taken me most of my life to figure this out, and I’m going to tell you what I wish an adult had told me at the time. What you’ve been through this year is a Really Big Deal, a major trauma. Your body is responding to extreme stress by getting sick, and you’re also in emotional shock, which is why you were excited at first and then confused and numb. It really sucks that all of this happened, and none of it—none of it!—is your fault.

“It will never make sense,” she continues, “what has happened to us, and the things to come that I can’t tell you about. But look” —she gestures to herself— “we’re still here! Right now, you don’t feel much besides numb, and that’s ok. At some point you will feel angry, and that’s ok too, and later on you’ll feel despair and depression and hopelessness and inconsolable sorrow, and I want you to know that’s all normal.”

The girl is staring at the author guilelessly, one of her incisors snagging the seam of her lips like an egg tooth. She has always been embarrassingly earnest. This quiet, awkward child. The author wants to take her into her arms but knows the girl would flinch away. Instead, she slips onto the floor beside her. They sit side by side, the shag rippling around them like waves on a polyester ocean.

“You are amazing,” she whispers, knowing that to speak it any louder would be to deliver a physical blow to this child whose emotional vocabulary is limited to just a handful of words. “Do you want to know why?” 

The author doesn’t turn to look but perceives a disturbance tumbling across the girl’s face, a quivering, a vehement shaking of the head.

The whisper is barely audible. “Why.”

“Because you’ve survived. And you keep on surviving through so much, for so long.”

Just then, a flicker in the corner of the room. The turquoise fibers beneath them grow darker and begin to sway. They both look down and lo, they are sinking into the rug. They look at each other in panic and reach out to clasp hands before going under completely. The room blinks out.

They open their eyes, but it stings, the wicked burn of saltwater up their noses and down their throats. They know instinctively not to breathe but to kick out and up, pushing off from the sandy ocean floor and reaching furiously for the surface, that dappled, shimmering plane fathoms above. But it is too far, and they are barely moving, their lungs spasming now with a fiery hunger. They unlink their hands and let muscle memory take over. 

They erupt from the water, two blind porpoises squealing triumphantly. They know this place without clearing the brine from their eyes, but when they do, when they swipe their salt-stringy hair from their faces to gaze at the long line of black sand coast and the towering palm trees with their rusty trunks and loaded branches, when they swat the gnats away from their exposed shoulders and finally turn to each other in wonder, in ecstatic disbelief, they state the obvious because there is nothing else to say. 

“This is Fiu,” says the author, just as the girl is saying, “we’re home.”

It sounds like a prayer. It feels like a plea. 

They cannot stay, they both know, have always known—even when they lived here, they knew!—but to be back again, even for a moment, even in the guise of a speculative essay, is a gift almost too sweet to bear. An oasis in an otherwise thirsty desert. 

One of them paddles towards shore. The other flips onto her back and lets the water embrace her. 

Does it matter who is who and which does what? They are both me. We are swimming and floating and digging and writing. We are a little too serious, and we are overly sincere, and we sometimes stray into maudlin territory, where we fetch up against a glacier of frozen tears from our childhood. Like us, it needs a witness, someone to sit quietly and observe the tender thaw. We are here, we say. Look. Isn’t it amazing? We are still here!