My mind had been in a world of its own all day. I wasn’t quite sure where it had been or what I had been doing. But I know that milk doesn’t go in the cabinet, and empty bowls don’t go in the refrigerator. So, my mind was somewhere else while I was going through the motions.
It happens sometimes. I get caught between the past and the present, like my thoughts can’t decide where they belong. Dad says I daydream too much. He laughs when he says it, and yet I can tell he means it. Daydreaming is good for a creative spirit, but it’s in life where all the real magic happens. I’m well aware of that, even though sometimes my dreams feel more real than the reality I’m living. It has always been that way.
Today was one of those days. I kept feeling a name creeping up from my soul. It faded in and out until it finally decided to stay. At last, the name entered the room and settled into a chair beside me. Her name was Mikayla. She was a playful little girl in a blue dress and a bow in her hair. She went on adventures that were so exciting to me that I thought I was on them with her. I don’t know why I was thinking so deeply about her like an old friend of mine coming to visit. But I’m glad she did. I think I needed her today.
Years ago, there was a part of my life I didn’t know. My memories of my real father had faded while I was being raised by a quirky couple who were figuring things out on the go. They had never had a child of their own. So, I was their first experiment. No, I meant to say that. I might have been their first experience, but it was so much more like I was an experiment.
Maggie was so motherly, her heart could hug me from across the room. Gilmer was so childlike that sometimes I felt like the grown-up when we were plotting our next quest. Together, they thought my name was Kissy, and I grew up thinking the same. It was a name that felt like sunshine. It wrapped itself around me like morning light shining through the window.
We lived in an old farmhouse that had been handed down through the family to Gilmer. It needed a little work, but it was a home. The furniture was lived in, and the walls had a life of their own. The floors could tell stories as they took you anywhere you wanted to go. There wasn’t any time of the day when you couldn’t smell hot food coming from the kitchen. It was one of Maggie’s joys in life.
Gilmer had a little world of his own in the barn where he kept his tools and did his work. I would often visit him out there to see what he was up to because most of the time, it was something interesting. He was always trying to invent a thingamabob for the world to use or come up with some kind of contraption to make his life a little easier.
One of his many gadgets was the walker, a device he created without knowing that a thing already existed with that name. His gadget was different, though. It was made of wood and metal bolts. It had springs and sliding things. When he stepped onto the footpads, they snapped to his boots. Up from that, kneepads were attached to rods that ran the length of his legs. At the top was a seat he could use to rest on long walks.
Maggie was amused when she saw him using it for the first time. It clanged and twanged as he walked around the yard. It held him loyally when he took a seat. The poor lady watched this boyish man show off his invention that helped him kneel to the ground and stand back up again. Then, it carried him across the yard when he walked straight up to her as she stood on the porch looking down with nothing to say. But fate had a way of giving her something.
When a spring came undone, the whole thing fell apart. He fell flat to the ground when the support gave way. The puzzled look on his face was priceless. There was no reason it shouldn’t have worked. He had thought it through so thoroughly.
Maggie nodded her head as she said, “That’s nice, Gilmer. You almost have it.”
Even I had to scratch my head because it had been working just fine. I watched him put it together. He had a drawing and everything. I even helped him figure out where some of the springs could go. So, I was just as baffled as he was.
While he went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out what went wrong, I went back to playing around the house. In front of the house was a dirt road that came from nowhere and went to nowhere as far as I could see. But behind the house was where all the real adventures took place. I had a world full of trees and little animals to find. There was a river that had narrow parts as well as wide parts. The first time I heard Gilmer say its name, I thought it was the Wrapper Hammock. I had no idea why a river would be called such an odd name.
But I’m twenty now. I just turned it this year, and that river is actually called the Rappahannock. I’ve been in Fredericksburg, Virginia, all my life, and that’s the river that runs through. It’s those same flowing waters that connected me to my real father, but I’ll save that story for later.
Maggie and Gilmer have long passed away, and that old house still sits there a few miles down the road. I haven’t been there for quite a while because my life has moved on since learning the truth. It wasn’t some small secret like where they had been hiding my sketchpads. It was bigger than finding out that my clothes had never been new, but that they had been bought off the rack at a thrift store and wrapped to make it look that way.
Finding out that my name wasn’t my name and my father wasn’t my father was a huge, mind-blowing twist. Maggie had written me a letter that explained it all. I didn’t find it until after she passed away.
My real name is Krista. They thought my name was Kissy because of the locket I was wearing around my neck the day they found me. My father’s name is Chris, a man I had just recently met and had no idea we were even related. He told me how my name came from his, and Kissy was my nickname because when I was young, I couldn’t pronounce it right. So, he gave me a locket with my nickname on it. When I think back hard enough, I can remember that was the last day I saw him until I met him again at a diner where I was working as a waitress.
That was a big bombshell of information that was dropped on me all at once. I wrapped my brain around it as quickly as I could and kept marching to the rhythm of life. But those things aren’t the kinds of things you simply tuck away in your back pocket before returning to the path you’re on. They have a way of sneaking up on you and exploding between your ears on a day when you least expect it.
Once in a while, when I look at my father, it feels like he’s a stranger to me. He is my real father and part of the reason I exist, but when I think back on all those years we missed, I really don’t know him. And the couple I knew, that quirky couple who raised me, they don’t feel real anymore. Yet, I miss them every day.
So my real father doesn’t feel like my real father, and the man who feels like my real father was only playing the part. My home on the river wasn’t really my home, while my real home was only a few miles down the road. They call that a hop, skip, and a jump away. Thinking about Maggie feels like a warm hug, but the name for mother was just a figment of my imagination. Everything I thought I knew about myself was made up on the fly. I dare say it was all a lie, but that’s a little harsh when everyone was only trying to do right by me. Try wrapping all that around your tongue and saying it five times fast.
This chair is comfortable, and the only thing that I can trust is real right now. But I can’t sit in it all day looking out the window. I’m lost and I know I’m lost. I think it’s time for me to go back to the place I once called home.
Part II Coming Soon!
