Before the beginning…
Memories were a tricky thing. They could elude you—or refuse to leave you alone. They could linger and linger, or refuse to return, no matter how hard you tried to recall them. For so long, I only had the memory of Inara’s birth to cling to from before. But as suddenly as my father came back into my life, so, too, did another memory return to me, a gift from before that fateful night.
The sun was warm on my back, I remembered the feel of it, and the way my dress swirled around my legs when I twirled. The memory was only a glimpse, a hazy, sunshine-washed dream more than anything. It was my mother, holding my hands and spinning with me. It was putting my hand on her swollen belly, and feeling the baby within squirm, a foot or a hand pressing through her skin to meet my hesitant, wondering touch.
It was brilliant green blades of grass beneath my toes, and the brush of a gentle breeze on my sweaty cheek. It was blue skies overhead and birdsong nearby, a high harmony to the rush of the waterfall that I’d heard but never seen. Mere flashes of color and movement, wrapped up in feeling—in security and love and happiness that was warmer than any sunshine. But I didn’t know to recognize and cherish the warmth until it was taken away—until he was taken away, leaving our world dark and cold, the sun banished to memory and dreams.
During all the years of his absence, the memory grew fuzzier and harder to recall, until it was little more than a deep-rooted yearning that would surface when I stood beside Inara in her gardens, when her eyes flashed a particular shade of fire-blue in the sunshine, that somehow reminded me of a different day standing on those grounds, a different life…when we’d been a family. When I’d only known the sun.
He was there that day, but his face had been taken from my memory as surely as he’d been taken from my life, so that I only recalled the sensation of his presence, but not him, actually standing beside us as we spun and spun and spun, Mother’s skirt billowing out around her swollen belly.
Until now.
He’d come back and with his return, my father’s face had also re-entered my memories. So that a glimmer of memory surfaced, and I finally remember him, too. How he’d watched us, his eyes flashing that same blue in the sunlight as Inara’s; how he’d laughed, how he’d pulled us both into his arms and held us close.
A circle of sunshine, of love, of family.
He’d come back and so did that one small memory.
But everyone knew that with any sunrise, there was also a sunset. Day must give way to night. We’d lived in the shadow of night for most of my life, and now, even though a glimmer of sunlight had been returned to us, I was still afraid.
Darkness still dominated, and with it a fear that this time, the sun might never rise again.
Copyright © 2020 by Sara B. Larson
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