It’s hard to remember those early years. It’s the ghosts of feelings mostly, that stick with me, muddled forms, wisps and mirages. I replay a blur of cold nights, driving to church, being carried to and from the truck by my dad, and especially having to always have a blanket thrown over my head during the winter, despite my protests. I remember nights that were shockingly crisp and clear with full moons, looking up at the moon and asking my dad to “get me that ball”.

“Oh, I can’t get you that ball,” he’d say, “it’s YHWH’s ball and since he put it in the sky, it has to stay there.” I remember confusing east with yeast, standing on a chair watching my mom make bread while looking out of the window facing the eastern sky. I thought that the ‘east’ used to rise the bread must’ve come from the ‘east’ that I saw gazing out of the kitchen window.

“No, not east, yeast,” she would explain. “Look at my mouth, ya-ya-ya-yeast.”

“Ya-ya-ya-east!” I’d triumphantly repeat.

I remember that, for a while, one of the single brothers lived with us. His name was Nathaniel. He quite naturally became a part of our family and to this day he is like an uncle, we kids loved him. He knew how to wind us up like toys and then let us shoot across the room. He would tickle us until we were breathless and then he’d run out the door and leave for work with my dad. My mom, exasperated, would scold, “Stop winding them up. You get them crazy and then walk out and I’m left with a bunch of rowdy kids!”

“Oh, we’re just having a little fun,” Nathaniel would dismiss her protest, laughing while he maneuvered a sharp turn one way and then the other, staying just out of reach of our tiny hands.

“But then you go to work and I’m the one who has to deal with them.” My mom didn’t think it was funny.

Sometimes he and my dad would team up and tease us to tears, like the time when my grandparents sent us balloons. We almost never had balloons so we were really excited but couldn’t blow them up by ourselves. They helped us to blow them up and then, one by one, rubbed them on our heads to create a static charge and stuck them to the ceiling far out of our reach. No matter how much we jumped or stretched, we couldn’t get them back. “Those are our balloons, give them baaack,” we whined.

“That’s not how you get what you want—what do you say?” They continued to tease.

“Pleease, can I have my balloon back?” we asked meekly. I didn’t think that made sense. Why make us say please for something they’d taken away from us in the first place?

I remember a bit later when one of the single sisters, Delia, lived with us for a few months. Delia was a wild woman with hair so short she looked like a boy. She was in her early twenties, new to the church and had a loud, mouth-wide-opened laugh that embarrassed the grown-ups. They shunned her, so we did, too. When she was baptized, she ripped her rings off her hand and threw them into the river shouting, “I’m free!”, throwing her hands into the air and then falling backward, back into the water. There were nervous laughs that rippled through the crowd on the shore as she pushed her way through the swirling, muddy water back to us, her dress dragging heavily behind her. It was no way for a sister to behave. But when she moved in with us, we kids grew attached. Every night she’d put us to sleep with a soft song that she’d taught us to sing in Spanish. We would sing with her until our eyelids grew heavy and we drifted off.

“Buenas noches, YHWH

Buenas noches, YHWH

Te amamos.”

She had been a teacher before joining the church and was one of the few people in the church who had a college degree and spoke Spanish fluently. When I was in fourth grade, she was my teacher for a semester, and for the first time, I actually learned how to diagram sentences and love it—I think that’s when my love of language, words, and how they fit together to form thoughts, was born. But by the next semester, they’d made her quit because Laycher’s grandchildren kept getting into trouble and said that it was because she was mean.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

When I was five, I learned how to mourn the state of the world. It was Sabbath Day and some of the brothers were at our house for lunch. We loved it when the brothers came over. They would tickle us, throw us into the air, chase us around the yard, or more often, make us chase them, which was an exasperating game because we could never catch them. Regardless, we found it delightful. Of course, it was the Sabbath so we weren’t supposed to play, but sometimes we did anyway. After lunch, one of the brothers picked up his guitar and told us that he had written a new song. My parents shushed us and we gathered around, closed our eyes and somberly prepared let the spirit move as he sang:

“The winds of change are blowing

It’s growing mighty cold

Prepare yourselves my brothers

For dark tales shall soon unfold

The time has gone beyond return

For this old ship called Earth.

And satan shall soon be struck down

In the midst of his great mirth.”

The song was in the minor keys, crying all on its own, poetry of impending doom, the end of it all, the world, the evil in the world, a day of reckoning, the day of judgement. It built passionately into a crescendo inside my little chest until, all of a sudden, I was weeping, heavy sobs that shook my whole body. It was late afternoon, the sun slanted into the living room revealing the dust worms that danced effortlessly in the air. The room glowed eerily like a message directly from YHWH. I turned away. I knew I should rejoice in YHWH’s presence, but instead I wanted to run from it. One of the brothers, Miguel, a young brother, barely twenty-two years old and new to the church, followed me into the dining room. He stooped down to my height and focused his huge, blue eyes directly into mine, which also made me want to run. The only time my parents ever said, “look me in the eyes” was when we were in trouble. His eyes were gentle and filled with concern.

“What’s wrong little one, are you hurt?”

I shook my head, no.

“Okay then, are you afraid?” I was very afraid, terrified, by the world that the song painted, by the horrors that it promised, but that’s not why I was crying.

“I’m worried about all the people in the world,” I whispered. “I don’t want them to burn and I don’t know what to do about it.”

That was my actual moment of birth. The moment that I realized what it meant to be me in that world. It was the moment that the weight of the world descended onto my tiny shoulders and attached itsself permanently. This memory is so crystal clear it could have happened yesterday.