A month had gone by. The last word I gave my parents was a promise
to make my way to Los Angeles where a ticket home would be waiting. I gave them
my word like pennies in the cup of a beggar — here, take this, it means nothing
to me and everything to you. And soon after I hung up the phone it wasn’t hard
to disappear across the Tijuana border again, back to my literal hole in the
wall, where the days and nights are a personal loss against the gains of drugs
and alcohol. I was eighteen years old.
Keeping time with trouble and heartache I wandered with
strangers through a dark life. And I stayed lost for a long while.
Though one day, there came a calm morning. Deep in Mexican
hills within a little attic space, I sat. The dawn shone through broken windows
and illuminated the floating dust in the air. Outside it was as quiet as I’d
ever heard. No children or cars. No vendors or Spanish cat calling. The busy
streets yielded their noise to make way for the noise of troubled minds.
I’ve succeeded in running away, I thought. Now what? Old
mattress springs creaked under me as I shifted to look out my window at a
beautiful, clear morning. I saw the blue sky through red eyes. Underweight and
beaten, my legs were heavy from walking streets that would never bear my
history.
I‘d run away from my family and myself, but were they gone? I
cried. My hands shook. And for the first time in a long time I heard a new
question: is it possible to disappear? For here I was thousands of miles away
from my family, worlds away from myself — an eternity away from God — and yet I was
sharing this morning with them still.
At this, I packed everything I owned and put it on my
shoulders to leave the poor walls of a stranger’s attic. I walked alone through
the streets and headed for the border. My tired legs carried me to a new life.
I was lost, but now I am found.
On a payphone by San Diego train tracks, I stood in the sun
and dialed a number I’d known since I was four years old. It rang. I heard a weak hello from the middle of the Midwest.
“Dad?” I asked.
And my father’s voice came to me, a tortured sound and my name, “Holly? Oh my God, my God! His voice cracked, “You’re alive, oh my God.”
The man didn’t sound like my father. I’d never heard my
father call out to God. Not ever. But now over the phone in his tenor, I heard
every muscle of a man’s heart release blood into empty chambers waiting for my
return. And I rested my head into the palm of my hand listening to my father
come to understand that his daughter wasn’t dead.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Dad—I’m still here.”
But how do we come back from darkness? When we are small and
alone in the vastness of our existence, when we abandon ourselves, who calls us
home to salvation? Who knows us?
There are times when we make an alter of doubt, but faith is nothing if not
patient. It will preside over you anyway, waiting for your return. It shares every
dark night, it shares every bright morning.
Friends, God grasps you like the sun on an aimless particle
of dust because even in the absence of anyone who can know you, you will be
uncovered and unearthed. Illuminated.
During this season I think about coming back. Returning.
I remember the Sunday morning I asked two fathers: how do I
come home?
It's the day when both showed me the way.
Holly Norton is a writer.
