DELLA

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Present Day

 

 

 

OKAY, I MADE my decision, Professor Baxter.

I’m going to do the assignment. I’m going write a non-fiction tale and make it read as fiction. However, I can’t take all the credit as it already reads fake without any embellishment from me.

I suppose I should start this tale with the requisite address that’s always used at the beginning of a story.

I don’t know what sort of grades my biography will earn from you, and I’m still marginally terrified of the consequences of what he’ll do for breaking my promises, but I’m actually excited to relive the past. To smile at the happy times. To flinch at the hard. To cry at the sad.

There are so many moments to sift through that it’s like cracking open a jewellery box after decades of dust, pulling out gemstones and diamonds, and struggling to choose what to wear.

That was what he did to me, you see? He made my entire life a jewellery box of special, sad, hard, happy, incredible moments that I want to wear each and every day.

He always said the truth was ours, no one else’s.

Well, now it’s yours, so here it goes…

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Once upon a time, there was a boy and a baby.

This boy didn’t say much, he scowled often, worked too hard, cared too deeply, and nursed a deep distrust of people and society that nothing and no one could soothe. He had scars on his skinny body that clenched my heart the more stories he told. He had wisdom in his eyes that came from suffering, not age. And he had mannerisms born from a man who already knew his fate rather than a boy just beginning.

This boy and the baby were never meant to be together.

They were from different blood, different people, yet because of what the baby’s father and mother had done, they were technically family in a strange, unexplainable way.

They say a child’s earliest memories occur when they’re as young as three years old, but those memories aren’t there forever. There’s a phenomenon called child amnesia that starts to delete those memories when they reach seven or so and continues to erase as you grow into adulthood. Only recollections of great importance are retained while the rest becomes a life-blur with no clarity.

I don’t know about you, but I know that to be true.

When I was younger, I remembered more. I know I did. But now I’m eighteen, I struggle to recall exact days unless something happened so crisp and clear it’s burned into my psyche.

I suppose you’re thinking how then can I tell my life story starting as early as a baby? I don’t know what happened, and my memory isn’t a reliable witness.

Well...I can tell you because of him.

I can tell you every day from the day I came into this world because that very same night—or it might’ve been the night before—my father cut off his finger. I can retell every night we ran and every night we swam. I can tell you every moment until right now while I sit in my room typing this paper.

I know I’m not following the fiction-writing rules by breaking the fourth wall and talking to you as if you here beside me, but it helps this way. It helps trick me into thinking once I tell you the truth, it will be forgotten the same way I’ve forgotten so many precious things. It helps pretending I’m not writing this down, so there is no permanent scar on the secrets I promised to keep.

So with child amnesia and adulthood slowly stealing my past, how can I sit here confidently and tell you my tale?

I’ll tell you again.

It’s because of my favourite thing of all.

The thing I’d beg for, the thing I’d do anything he asked for, the cherished time of day that no one could steal.

A story.

A bedtime story meant to lull a frightened babe to sleep but turned into something so precious and coveted, I’d get goosebumps whenever he agreed.

You see, he was my only form of TV, book, radio, internet, or cartoon.

Without him, I would know nothing; I wouldn’t have grown through the adventures he gave me. I’d still be a child born to monsters.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I share his bedtime stories, I first need to introduce him.

The Boy.

That was my first word, you know.

He said it was because as a baby I would’ve heard my parents calling him Boy. They never used his name—probably never knew it. And because I was their little monster, unchanged yet by what he would make me become, I called him what they called him.

Boy.

A thing not a someone.

A possession.

I don’t remember, but apparently the first night I called him that, he’d left me in a hurry. He’d stalked the forest on his own until his famous temper cooled, and he returned to me in the tent he’d stolen and the sleeping bag we shared.

I hadn’t been sleeping, waiting for him to return with tears in my eyes and my ribbon wrapped around my fingers so tight they’d turned blue to match the satin.

He’d sat cross-legged in front of me, glowered with his endless dark eyes, and thudded his chest with his fist. “Ren,” he’d told me. “Ren, not Boy.”

It didn’t occur to me until much later why he didn’t have a last name. That night, he wouldn’t let me sleep until I’d wrapped my infant tongue around those three little letters.

Apparently, once I’d mastered it, I never shut up.

I said it all the time, to the point he’d slap his hand over my mouth to stop me.

Even without his bedtime stories filling in the blanks and painting pictures I’ve forgotten, I can honestly say Ren is my favourite word.

I love every history attached to it.

I love every pain lashed to it.

I love the boy it belongs to.

I don’t know if Ren looked the same when he was ten as he did when I started to remember him, but I can say his hair never changed from its tangled mess of sable and sun. Dark brown in winter and copper bronze in summer, his hair touched his shoulders one year then cut short the year after. But the tangled mess was always the same, shoved out of his coal-coloured eyes with nine fingers not ten, his nose slightly crooked from being broken, his cheekbones so sharp they were cruel.

Even as a boy, he was beautiful.

Too beautiful to carry the depth of suspicion and guardedness he never fully shed.

Too beautiful to be responsible for the wake of misdeeds left in his path.

Too beautiful to be normal.