“Dad,” Lucas came home one afternoon with tears in his eyes, “we broke the vase of tulips.”
For the last twenty years, I have lived with a sort of guilt that was never to be revisited. The sort that I locked in the deepest, darkest part of the attic. The sort where, in those late, shuffling nights, when I was tempted to peek through the crack and catch a glance of it, I would suddenly remember what is there and slam the door shut. I had talked myself through the rights and wrongs until it became a hundred percent sure that what I had done was justified. After all, there was no way out.
I hadn’t allowed myself to think through what had happened. Each time I was reminded of the memory, I shut it out before it could bother me. But then I looked my son in the eye, saw my reflection in his tears, and found myself letting down the ladder. And there it was. The memory that I thought rotted to bare bones was right in front of me in all its shame.
“When I was your age, the village was, well, more of a village.”
And before I knew it, my lips were moving. Words were echoing through the air with such perfection and vividness that gave it the impression of having been carefully rehearsed.
“Food was scarcer back then. Our school owned a piece of land planted with wheat every year. The teachers and students were in charge of taking care of the crops. It was a safety measure, of a sort. If the harvest was bad that year, if there’s a drought, or pests maybe, we would use the food from this land to put the entire village back at ease. It never did much, but it gave a sense of security to an entire village.”
“Me and a couple of friends were playing in the field. That morning, I had managed to sneak a box of matches–.”
“No! You burnt everything down?”
It’s weird how no one saw it coming. Lucas didn’t even let me get past the “box of matches”. Really, what were we thinking? What was I thinking?
It was all coming back. The flames flashed before my eyes.
Then I told Lucas about how we started off by lighting a single piece of dried straw. How we waved it around like firecrackers and laughed like we never will again. How then a single piece turned into another, then a handful.
That was part of the excitement. How far could we go before it was all over? We set stacks of dried straw onto the field and dropped matches on them. Once the fire began to grow, we would jump on it to stump it out. We would panic as the fire grew, but we would laugh at each other once it was gone. We kept pushing the limit, joking about what would happen when it got out of control. We felt powerful, rebellious, young, that was how I justified it.
Of course it grew out of control. There really seemed to be no other way to end the day.
It was dusk. The flames burnt across the sky, leaving its ashes in a smoky shade of amber.
We ran away.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. No one suggested that we should run away. Everyone just, did. We didn’t wait for each other. We sprinted in different directions as if that was enough to undo the destruction.
We stood among the tidy crowd, watching, keeping perfect posture as the flag rose the next morning. I forgot my red scarf for the ceremony.
No I didn’t. I just couldn’t bring myself to put it on.
After the usual procedures, what we had been dreading all morning finally came. The principal spoke into the microphone, the one that was always used for award ceremonies, asking the culprit to speak up. He kept talking, though I can’t remember what he said anymore. He moved with violent hand gestures. The microphone shook as he flung his arm around, pointing at our ruins. I couldn’t keep my posture straight. I felt a heavy, horrible sense of guilt sink into my shoulders. What if there is a drought this year? Or pests? It swarmed around me, threatening to swallow me whole. The village will starve, and kids will die. It circulated every vein in my body. It rose to my chest only to explode there. I could contain it no longer.
“We did it!”
I screamed across the field, filling it with deafening silence. The students, the teachers, the principal, my friends, they were all staring. When I saw that there was no going back, I spilled everything. I told the principal how I had stolen the matches from home, how we set little fires, then bigger ones, how it grew out of control, how we ran away.
I named everyone who was there.
The school thought I was a hero. The principal punished us, but a lot lighter than he should have. He thanked me for being honest. For weeks people would talk about how brave I was to own up to what I had done. They called the others cowards, people who dared to do but could bear no responsibility.
But I knew. We never said it out loud, but I knew that we were supposed to be in this together. We were friends, and friends don’t sell each other out. If we were going to own it, we owned it together. And if one person was too afraid, if one person wanted to hide it, then we all hid it with him. I don’t know what was wrong with me that morning, but I knew the moment I opened my mouth, it was going to be a betrayal.
There was no way out, was there? We couldn’t hide it forever. Surely someone would have found out eventually. And when they found out, the consequences would have been so much worse. We couldn’t have convinced everyone to admit it together either, people were too afraid. I had no way out.
So when Lucas looked up at me, with tears in his eyes, telling me that he and Jack had broken the vase of tulips in the classroom together, I didn’t know what to say. I could only tell my story.
The next day, Lucas came home and ran into the living room. He bounced on the couches, cheering. After a while, he lied on the cushions, his arms and legs spread out in relief.
“I told the teacher.” He said. I could hear his grin.
“What did you say?”
“I said I broke it, all by myself.”
“And then?”
“And then she smiled and acted confused, telling me that Jack had told her the same thing.”
Sources: 1
