I am a Traveler

It started when I was young, too young to even know it was happening. My mom and dad brought me home from the hospital. They were so tired and so happy to have their newborn. They place me on the bed in between the two of them. They fell asleep cocooning me in their warmth. That was the first and only time they felt safe with me.

When the morning came. I was nowhere to be found. The indent I made from the bed was still there. My picture was on milk cartons, TV, social media. Nina, the baby that vanished.

Five years, five years of not knowing where I had gone. They cried and prayed for me every day.

One day my mother was home alone. She was weak and starting to adjust to life without her child. When she heard crying coming from the bedroom. She knew that cry from deep in her bones. She went to the bedroom and there I was. Still three days old. While the world aged five years. I was in the same place where they last saw me. My mother held me as if I was going to disappear again.

My father didn’t believe it to be true. Thought the world was playing a trick on him. For he swallowed my death years ago. The blood test was the only thing that keeps his suspicions down.

My parents are the strongest people I know. They still loved me, after all, I put them through.

This wouldn’t be the first time I lost years with my parents.

I remember playing hide and go seek when I was eight. It was summer my mother had short black hair. The trees were full of leaves and flowers, the colors were vibrant. The air smelled of cut grass and pollen. I could hear my mother counting, I hid behind the tree. Her voice faded at “Five.” The heat and moisture were sucked out of the air. I was cold. The sky was cloudy. The trees were bare. I came out of my hiding place, snow cutting into my sandals. My mother was nowhere to be seen. So, I started walking home.

When I got home, I saw her. She dropped her laundry basket and ran to me. Her hair was long and starting to gray.

“You found me,” she said holding me tight.

My parents were twenty-seven when I was born and eighty when I turned twenty-one.

My father was going senile. It is hard to take care of your parents when you are trying to start your own life. Every time he would see me, he would light up and say,

“Your back! For how long.”

I would give him a sad smile and reply, “I don’t know.”

Somedays he would forget me, say I wasn’t his daughter, “Nina is ten.”

I remember his funeral. The crowd was big. Most people didn’t know me. They thought my parents didn’t have kids, not after poor Nina. I wasn’t mad, it’s hard to tell people your daughter jumps through time. The ceremony was sweet. People told stories of my father. How he volunteered at orphanages. They say he love children and wanted to give them a family they were denied. There is so much I didn’t know about him. So much time I missed.

After everyone left my mother and I stood by his headstone. I felt her weak hand around me. I held on to her as tight as I could.

I watch the vines grow on the stone. I was cold and without my mother. The grass was growing and dying right in front of me. I watched a new hole dug up and filled. Everything slowed. And there are two stones now. My mother and father.

I am without time. Without family and I am a traveler. Not by choice. Forever adrift, unable to take anyone with me.