Rith Missingno | District 1 | Done

Rith Missingno

You were never supposed to exist.

You’ve had years to look past the story that your father and mother were young and drunk, heavy on a childhood fling that meant nothing long term. A tryst between teenage lovers in the back of a dimly lit gym, the moment pressed past what either of them had really wanted.

He was too short, your mother recalls, with her voice soft and head far away. The years have brought lines under her eyes and she’s tired of recollecting the past, but not so tired that she couldn’t spare another story about the man that had left her high and dry. Always came in last in his training group, but he knew how to make me laugh.

There’s a patch of melancholy there, you think, in her remembering a boy that could bring something out of her that others failed to do. But she’d never meant to give herself away to a boy that wasn’t serious, much less one that wouldn’t remember her the next day.

She swore up and down that she’d taken every precaution, at least, the sort of precautions someone who’d had little experience could take.

You aren’t angry at her telling the story. She shaped it over the years, as though a bit of clay she was perfecting to the right shape. Here or there another little memory about the man who’d made him. He loved spicy food, just like you, spicy enough that tears would stream down from his eyes. It’s why he came over to taste her parent’s cooking. He marveled at the fish sauce, the chili pepper, and all manner of things his family never ate.

You’d not needed him much. Your grandfather was perfectly capable of showing you the way, albeit a little slower and a little rougher than the younger men who greeted their sons outside the schoolhouse. Always making sure your hair was combed and your shirt tucked in, appearance was tantamount to order. A steady soul was one of order, even when the rest of the world was in disarray. You had to fight chaos to find space for your soul. If you couldn’t discover the clearest path or direction, you’d be a wanderer like so many of this district.

He owned a distribution company which kept him away now and again, but whenever he came back to the house, everyone sat up a little straighter. There was no raised voices across the dinner table, even in a spirited debate. You could imagine being six and being told to present yourself clearly and steadily, with arguments supported with some sort of evidence. Without a point, you’d be cut off – your ideas reduced to nonsense, waved away as unworkable of uninteresting.

Perhaps it’s why you fled now and again to your grandmother. She was the sort that embraced the disorder, flowed through space with grace and blossomed, too. She’d hold your hand and let you stop to see the flowers growing on your neighbor’s fence. She’d tell you that it was up to you to find a path, but that it could lead many different directions. There was no great, final road that would lead you to where you were supposed to be.

Even if you could fly and reach heaven, you’d never find joy without finding it in yourself, first.

Of course, now and again you wondered what their lives would’ve looked like without you. Your mother could’ve pursued a degree earlier, and not been distracted by a little toddler that’d forced her to drop out of career training. Your grandfather could’ve retired years ago instead of lifting his tired old bones out of bed for another day of work.

They didn’t love you any less, of course, and you knew that. That never so much as crossed your mind, only that your existence seemed to call into question the whole game. Were you their glitch, the boy that’d sprang out of nothing to throw the rest of them off balance? Were you only a half of something that would never quite be whole?

Career training provided no answers, other than to empty your head of distractions.

You turned instead to ask her, where did you come from?

You were eighteen, and deserved some sort of answer. With facts, and reasons, and all the truth a boy too young and too dunderheaded to understand could get.

So she took the clay she’d been shaping and fired it in the kiln, all the truth and turns and presented it to you.

You’d find it never solved a thing – knowing who you were, how you came about, what you’d meant to be – raising instead more questions and curiosity.

At least, you imagined, it was better than being so well defined, even if it made you a strange footnote.

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