Sometimes, Only

Sometimes, Only.

McKenzie Maxwell

Sometimes an only child isn’t alone. Often, the child is surrounded by loved ones, neighbors, nursery-mates, toys and imaginary company. I grew up as a lower middle class only child, in the 90s, without a computer or cable. My parents both worked full time jobs and I spent a lot of time being babysat. There are some benefits to such an upbringing: educationally and economically, for sure. As an adult, I admire my parent’s choice to have one child. It was economically responsible and absolutely the best things for my mother’s health.

As a child, I was brutally jealous of my friends who had siblings. I would lie to my most gullible friends and tell them I had an evil twin sister who my parents kept in the attic. It was better to implicate my parents in imaginary child-abuse than to admit I was growing up in a sibling-less home. I’d never even been in the attic, but I imagined it an empty cavern of nothingness and mice. The scratching of rodents and howling of wind aided my fibs during sleep-overs.

Our home was an old stucco farmhouse. It was not the farmhouse of highly successful farmers but of people who struggled to make a life. They had patched things together and layered things to make the house whole. It was the kind of house that had 1950s newspapers used as insulation and when you tore down a wall, you might find a window or a door plastered over. The house was time layered on time and necessity nailed to necessity. I love the quirks of my childhood home and often imagined the previous owners going about their business in the home.

When I was around 10, my parents had the opportunity to move. My mom, being polite, asked me to weigh in on the decision. I kicked and cried and yelled that I would die in this house before it was sold. At some point by parents decided not to move, without telling me and at some point I conceded to move, without telling them.

At the time, I had a shallow understanding of real-estate practices, but I decided that instead of actually dying in the house, I would move with my parents and haunt the house for the new owners. They would be so disturbed, that the owners would hand the house back.

I wrote little, spooky notes on scraps of paper and rolled them up like tiny scrolls. I hid them in the nooks and crannies of the house in anticipation of the sale, which never came.

Time went on and I forgot about the instance until the conversation about moving came up 10 years later. I was living out of the house and less attached to my romanticized stories of the home. I laughed remembering my devious plan and confessed to my parents who palmed their forehead. They found many of my notes and had saved them. I searched the house for my tiny scrolls and, indeed, I found many of them tucked away undiscovered. We collected the notes together and read through the notes. Mostly they were simple statements in the misspelled, backwards penciled print of a child just learning to write.

“Please leave.”

“go away.”

“go home.”

And then in ink, on paper that almost broke to touch, a message in cursive which I could not claim:

I cannot leave unless they let me.

-yours, in the attic