City on the Sea

I.

The kid couldn’t read, the kid couldn’t write. But believe me, she was the center of our universe, she was our most bright. She looked like no one else here – her eyes wide, her skin dark, like the most giving stars, like the most peaceful night. Tell the children to gather round for the return of stolen stories, for the return of their storyteller. Tell them all the good they believe in never died. Dear children, you were born to an era where villains controlled and lied, and tried their best to change you. The truth was they were running out of time. Because she was the one, she was one of your kind.  

She was eleven years old and she never knew what she came from besides a boat that brought her here three years ago. Her parents never made it onto the boat, it seemed, but she escaped what they had wanted her to escape. That was the worst feeling of all. She couldn’t even remember her mother’s face, or how her father cooked every day, having her test the taste – she couldn’t remember a single place or a single name from where she came. She was just a child left alone on a green boat that brushed up on top of this beautiful New England beach, washing over crumbling sand castles like little kingdoms, forgotten. The old lady living in the lighthouse nearby didn’t notice the child until the sun arrived and she looked out her window, surprised, as she brushed her teeth.

        The old lady Jane and her husband Noah accepted this child as their own, and brought her up to the lighthouse to stay. They covered her in the rose blanket. They carried her together over the sand into shelter. They felt alive again after so many years of sadness. But you already know how this story starts. In the lighthouse, hope was born, outside our world scoffed. There was nothing sacred to a stranger. There was nothing beautiful to a common beach. Let them stay together, the child, the lighthouse no one cared about anymore. Just leave the good town out. Spread doubt across the people by word of mouth. After all, who knew where she came from? Did she bring disease? Did she require excessive needs? Doors closed and locked. Hers was a fairytale whose end nobody knew. The water began to take on a more wasteful hue. The darker the blue. Oh so afraid of breaking free from old ways. The kid grew. The beach remained empty.

She was a good human being. She liked life under sunlight and not under ceilings. Trust me it was not in her nature to hurt anyone’s feelings. Sometimes she walked into town to see things as the laughter of other children faded with her footsteps. Parents forced their children to walk past her. She held back tears from her eyes. She knew how they felt. How could she judge someone else when she still had so many questions left about herself? She wore the thin chain with her own name engraved so she could remember more than being born to the smell of embers. If you want to know the truth, it hurt her most when those few people tried to be nice. Because niceness is a broken promise in a world that treats you different. She learned this again when she went to visit the one home in town she was invited to, the chipped barn raised over the marshes, dressed in her favorite green skirt, donning one of Noah’s safari caps. Before she could get to the stairs leading to the front door, the elder with the robes and the gavel mightier than a wand enforced the proper order of things, as we are told they should be.

      “There are several complaints being filed about you walking around this neighborhood,” the judge said.

The judge’s voice was as cold as someone who went to school for too long. Dear children, please dream of becoming whoever you want to be, but don’t let too much school or work be the reason you stop thinking for yourselves.

“What’s written is written, child. There’s no precedent for you being here.”

The kid did not know what these words meant. She started to suffocate from the humid midst. Your honor, she wanted to throw stones, to collect shards of scattered sea glass with the other kids. Her honor, unlike yours, would never hurt nobody.

 “I have to take you back to the beach. It’s my job to make the decisions we’re most comfortable with. You kids these days just need to listen.”

The judge never asked her why she was here. As if the kid couldn’t speak.

    The kid could speak though. The first words she spoke to the old couple in the lighthouse that fateful morning they brought her in –

  “My name is Aleah,” she said. “But you can just call me Ali.”

So you see Ali could speak, but the world works in unfair ways. Imagine, if everyone around you believed that all you did was tell lies, you might start to believe that you were lying too, even when you told nothing but the truth. That’s why Ali didn’t speak much in public.

Ali spoke mostly to the beach that was grey like a soft concrete, and to the sea where her heart still seemed to be. The old man of the lighthouse, Noah, tried to teach her how to read the words written on paper when all she cared about was learning how to read the sea. The old lady Jane taught Ali how the lens of the lighthouse worked and how to study the tides. Ali’s dream was to build a boat big enough to bring her parents here. They must be out there somewhere. Yet she remembered so little about her parents that, in her dreams, she’d become blind every time she sailed the sea to find them.

Then, one night, when Ali turned eleven, another boat brushed up on top of this beach. Voices from the boat spread along the shore. Ali raced out to the voices down the small mountain of rocks that separated the lighthouse from the beach sand. Once she got to this new boat Ali lost all sight in her eyes, her eyes more precious than diamonds, she thought, as she was about to cry.

“Don’t get upset,” the voice in front of her said.

“Who are you?” Ali asked. “Did you come from where I came from?”  

“No,” the voice said. “I am a star. Please don’t be upset anymore. I would have found you earlier but you were too young to understand what I am here to tell you. The way the world acts right now, Ali, it’s become a horrible place for someone like you, it’s been a horrible place for quite some time. The world is the way it is and people die without reason, but it doesn’t have to be like this forever. You were born to change this world for the better. You were born different, like a spring of water in the desert.”

The voice stopped. Ali heard the boat rocking away in the water. Suddenly all the light from the everlasting stars above poured down into her eyes, and she was able to look deep into space in a way that reminded her of the inside of a kaleidoscope, except now Ali could see the whole world at once too – all the people on every continent, all the beauty no king or queen could ever conquer, no matter if they spent all their time and money trying. Ali closed her eyes shut. This was all too much.

You would have thought this was all a dream if it happened to you, even though you had never dreamed in such detail, even though you know you could never imagine this moving picture that no movie director could recreate. That’s what Ali first thought when she woke up the next morning on her floor mattress. Long ago the old couple had hand painted the walls of their lighthouse with the words of poems. Ali read the Emily Dickinson poem on the wall by her mattress:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,       I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help the fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.

And so for the first time, Ali could read. Ali could write.