Why Now?

The Land of Dreams is an unfinished conversation.

At the age of seventy-six, I found myself asking a question I never expected to ask.

Why now?

Why are these memories coming back now?

Why can't they stay buried?

I realized there was an unfinished conversation.

It began with a man who lied to me.

He made me beg.

He made me cry.

He kept doing it until he finally broke me.

And something unexpected happened.

Memories began returning.

I don't want to deal with this at my age.

Can't they just go back into hiding?

I don't want to talk to you.

Go away.

Quit tapping at the edge of my memory.

I don't want to hear you.

"You need to hear me," a little voice said.

"Stop knocking on my memory," I answered.

"No. You need to hear me."

"No," I whispered. "No, I don't."

"You need to remember what he did to us."

I closed my eyes.

"Please... just leave me alone."

There was a long silence.

Then I heard the words that changed everything.

"Why did you go away and leave me all alone?"

I stopped and looked into the child's eyes.

She looked back at me.

And then I saw it.

The terror.

Not fear that lasted for a moment, but the terror of a little girl who believed she had been left behind.

Without thinking, I gathered her into my arms.

I held her with all the love I had spent a lifetime searching for in the arms of strangers.

"It's okay," I whispered.

"I'm here now."

She didn't speak.

She didn't have to.

I could feel the loneliness she had carried all those years. The loneliness of believing she had been abandoned. The loneliness of waiting for someone to come back for her.

I held her tighter.

"I won't leave you again."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"None of this was your fault."

Then, for the first time in my life, I understood something that child had needed someone to tell her decades before.

"It was our father's sin, not ours."