It’s possible to build a whole life out of other people’s stories. You can fill in the details with imagination and hope. You can make a new childhood to replace the one you lost.
I wake up to the smell of smoke. It is night again, and I am in the forest, naked, covered with dirt. My skin inhales it through the cuts all over my body. I am absorbing the earth. I am putting down roots.
Something is different this time.
I can’t stay here. I am not wild, not made for the forest. It is time to go home.
The forest whispers its gossip. I don’t care what it says about me. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I have built a life on caring too much. That life is over. That life has burned away.
The trees grow impatient. They grab and scratch and pull at my hair. I run, but they trip me with their roots. My knees scrape and burn, soil pushing grit into my blood. I break out of the forest into the clearing, and I brace myself for what I know I’m going to see: my favorite rock, my climbing tree, but nothing else. Where Daddy’s garden should be is only a bent, rusted fence protecting a plot of overgrown, dry weeds. I call out to my fathers even though I know no one’s here. All I hear is the trees mocking me. A feral cat steps out of the shadows. I say “Gotami!” but it just hisses and runs away.
And there, in the place where I painted a memory of my home, is an old abandoned church at the end of a gravel road in the middle of the forest, years’ worth of ivy creeping between the crumbling stones. The windows are long gone. There is no tasteful Episcopal stained glass left. Everything of value was stripped long ago.
The heavy wooden door is rotting off its hinges. I step into a dusty, cobwebbed cavern barely lit by pale moonlight streaking through the glassless windows. Overturned pews, an old wasps’ nest hanging in a corner of the ceiling, decaying floorboards sprouting ferns, the tendrils of ivy reaching up the walls like bad veins.
I follow the smoke down the hill. I tell the trees I will join them soon. The blood on my feet will nourish the soil, I will drop my roots and fuse with theirs, and I will learn their secret language.
I know the deer trails. I know my way around the crowds and the cameras and police lights. I know my way around in the dark.
The house is on fire and so is the world, and no one’s trying to put it out.
I rise with the smoke. I climb up the stairs to our bedroom. I find our packed suitcase at the foot of the bed with nowhere to go. I look in our purse. I find a whole bottle full of glittering, golden pills. What did these thousands of dollars’ worth of Freedom buy us?
Our phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up and dial Lily’s number, but no one answers. What time is it in Taiwan? What time is it here? I look at the phone as I throw it on the bed and the name Dr. Lily Chen shows on the screen.
Everything is pain. My lungs are full of knives. My skin is so hot.
I set the fire. It was time to burn this prison down.
Are we free yet?
There is our mother, fortified by gin, standing close to the most handsome police officer. We must be on fire, because everyone starts screaming when they see us come out of the burning house. Flames must be shooting out of our eyes. Our skin must be melting off. We are only a charred skeleton moving across this scorched piece of earth.
This is my origin story. This is my creation myth. This is me being born from the ashes of everything I destroyed. The police are yelling, but I can’t hear them. The sound of the fire is too loud in my ears. I can see them draw their guns. I can see the way they look at me, like I am dangerous.
How does it feel? I would ask them if I could speak. How does it feel to be afraid?
They draw their guns, but I do not care. I am done caring. All I know is everything is on fire, but I am not afraid. Sometimes things need to be burned down. Some seeds only open and grow when they’ve been through fire.
I see myself in a garden, working alongside a man who looks exactly like Daddy but is not Daddy. He is telling me about soil, about what makes it rich, what nutrients it needs to make things grow. He looks up and meets the eye of one of the therapists on his way to the outdoor group circle, a man who looks just like Papa but who is not Papa. Their smiles make the sun burn brighter; the tomato vines stretch, their fruits darken. I wish I was theirs.
I wonder what it would feel like to be born in the middle of that glance. What would it feel like to be caught inside that love, to be created by it?
There is no garden. There is only fire. There is only my mother’s gin-drenched voice: “Ivy, what have you done?”
At the end of this story, there is just me, surrounded by flames. Everything I built is gone. There is no home, no Papa, no Daddy, no Lily.
There is no Fern. There has never been Fern.
There are strangers looking, talking, taking pictures, posting my new story into the world. My eternal audience, making me, destroying me, then making me again, over and over, our own little ecosystem, our own little universe. Nothing to something to nothing again.
There has always been Fern, but that was never her name.
Ivy. Evergreen. The most aggressive weed. Adaptable. Impossible to kill.
It has not rained. It will not rain. There is water all around this island, but none to put the fire out.
There are sirens painting the night into a hallucination. With every rotation they say: This is not real. This is not real.
But this is real. This is the only real thing.
There’s a police officer saying, “Ivy Avila, you are under arrest,” and then he says all the other things cops say on TV shows as they lead the girl to the police car, as they put their hands close to where they shouldn’t just to let her know that they can.
But this is real and my show has been canceled, and now there’s nothing left of me but a charred shell in the shape of a girl who used to be somebody, full of dust and specks already forming something new. Something solid. Something better. Something mine.