Chosen Fate

I had always thought I stayed out of obligation.

The farm seemed older than the land it was built on. The screech of the rusted hinges of the barn sounded just as natural to me as the crickets did in the field. If the question had ever been asked, I would have said that the wood of the barn had started rotting before the first nail was hammered in.

Folks had always said we were lucky, a farm had everything you ever needed for a family to survive: a garden to sew for food, animals to harvest for meat, shelter from the worst of storms, and people to know and love you.

I used to believe them, I used to look up with wide eyes full of the blissful ignorance of youth and the unbroken heart of someone who has yet to live. I used to take those words and hold them close as I mapped out my future in soil and sweat.

I used to believe I had all the time in the world to figure it out, to know how I fit in as part of a grand legacy stretching back generations of those whose calloused hands prodded and pruned and whose weary muscles moved mountains.

I thought it was a destiny that kept me here, some higher power that had chosen to place me into the crumbling wooden bones that sheltered me; that I was to replace board by board this house of Theseus.

At some point in my life, when childhood had long since become a distant memory but before old age had settled on my shoulders, I came to the realization that the map I had followed and planned so carefully wasn’t outlined by my own hand.

It was the old window in the attic that brought me the clarity. It’s funny to me describing anything in this house as old. Everything on this land is old, from the trees where the property line is rumored to exist to the dreams that live within its borders.

Its wooden frame had long ago been eaten away by bugs eaten away by birds eaten away by cats eaten away by time. The light barely showed through the layer of dust coating it, the only true sunlight came through the broken upper left pane. The sharp edges had been smoothed down by what I had to assume was rain, judging by the stained wood of the sill.

I tried to imagine what this window looked like when it was first set into the frame. Was it ever any different? Did it look onto these same fields or had the first seed yet to be planted? Did the people who set this glass choose it because of how beautiful they imagined it would look as people gazed at it from below or was it the only choice they had?

Do I stay here because this is the best life I could imagine for myself?

Or is it because this is the only the choice I was given?

To me that seems as much a choice as the fly choosing to get stuck in the web.

But here? In the confines of these rooms with its yellowed wallpaper peeling at ever corner where the smell of decay lingered in the gaps between the floorboards, what waited for me here? A death in the same bed I was born on? A eulogy on the rug where I took my first steps?

Would I be able to see where they buried me from this broken window?

It was at that precise moment when I knew I had to leave.

Staying was not the obligation of some predetermined fate I had to fulfil.

It was a choice.

There is no ethereal chain holding my worn leather boots to the soil, no ribbon stringing me along to the monotonous motions of yesterday and tomorrow.

It was a choice that I stayed so it had to be a choice to leave.

I did not take the time to pack, any hesitation would allow indecision to creep in and poison the purest of intentions. I hurried down rickety steps and out through the screened door, letting it slam behind me with a loud thud. Past the glistening dew covered vines, not bothering to pluck any of the ripened fruit hanging in my wake, I quickened my pace, jogging past the rusted tractor that had long given way to rain and time, past the empty stalls and stale hay.

I walked until my shoulders were shaded by the forest that separated my past from my future. I walked until I saw faces I did not recognize and signs in languages I never bothered to learn. I walked until my boots wore smooth and my mind was clear.

Though I wish I could be present for tearful reunions of those who were never given the chance to say goodbye or to keep that sweet nostalgia from being safely tucked into the back of my mind. But turning back brought the risk of slipping back into the monotony, no the complacency, of a life half-lived: a life lived for someone else.

I cannot return home, not because of a war that lit the misguided passions of men, leaving nothing but the taste of ash in the mouths of those who breathed it in. Not because of a vast and unimaginable distance broken only by the borrowed generosity of those travelling the same path. Not because of time that magnified tense words and the spaces between them.

I cannot return because I am afraid.

To the core of my being, the center of my bones, I fear of becoming someone as forgotten and long-lost as a broken window in the attic of a crumbling mausoleum. I fear losing myself, leaving to rot in a field with the only ones left to appreciate the life that once was are the worms and beetles that help to bloom the foliage above me as I slip farther into the earth with each rainfall.

I wish to live and to do that I had to leave.

And I can never go back.