A Conversation with the Rainbow Child
“A Conversation with the Rainbow Child” is a short story about being able to have a conversation with a younger you, seeing where you came from and how far you have come.
I’m always awake making wishes at 11:11, hoping that they will someday come true. I never truly believed they would, knowing that they would just float in the night's silence before vanishing. I’d rather think that than to hold on to false hope that someday I could get the things I wished for.
Now I’m sitting across from the little girl in a pink nightie. E both sit with our legs crossed just looking. I wish I could hear what she was thinking, what assumptions they were making about the person they sit across from. Does she like how I look, does she feel safe?
But I can’t, so instead I just sit here and look. Watching the way her nose looks like a bunny as it twitches from her sniffling. The random shivers I can feel traveling down her back. But most of all I can see the way her freckles lay across her skin like a map of stars, her chubby cheeks grow as she doesn’t suppress her smiles. It’s like she is not tainted by the thoughts that plague my mind. All I can do is just observe her innocent beauty. Shortly interrupting my guilt as I face the little girl I have put through our purgatory and before my mind can fully understand how the little girl in front of me is . . . well in front of me she interrupts our silence.
“Your room is so pink, and we have pictures up.”
“Yeah, we uh stopped trying to not like pink a little while ago, we also don’t die how we like ‘girly’ things anymore like make up and ballet, and these pictures help me feel like you again.”
“What are we like now?”
The Earth feels still, like her voice holds the power to stop it from turning, freezing everything outside this room. It’s such an innocent question from those wide eyes. An innocent question that I don’t know how to answer. What are we like now?
“We are still hiding but not as much. People know some of our secrets but there are still some that we keep close to our heart?”
“Like what?”
“Like how we still don't feel comfortable in our skin, like our body doesn’t match our mind all the time, but we finally know why we feel like this?”
“We do?”
I watch as her face starts to show joy without fear, without hiding the way her nose crinkles up and she shakes her arms. Knowing this feeling all too well my eyes start to fill with tears I refuse to shed knowing that in a few short months she will stop feeling safe enough to show her happiness without turning her body to stone just to stone movements.
“Yeah, it even has a name, but I will let you go on that journey, all you need to know right now is that we understand it now, though we are yet to tell everyone”
My chest starts to feel heavy again, the house I know she will have to go back to weighing on my chest. The crumbling lung that we both share starts to close, knowing that I want to tell them the truth, the whole truth. That we don't fit in any one category, that we learn there are more boxes outside of female/male. A box that we fit into, that makes our body feel like our own for the first time. But I bite my tongue so hard I fear I could swallow it as I remember how that path had to be traveled. That I had to spend those nights without sleep going through BuzzFeed quizzes and nodes websites learning our truth to fully accept it.
“Do we start feeling happy again?”
I didn't know that this was the question I feared the most. The question that could change how hard she tries to fight. Soi stays silent just watching as she fidgets with her fingers. Rolling her ankles as we sit face to face tells me what I need to say. Because how do I tell this little child that we don’t feel happy for a long time, but the pain starts to change. That the monster we have lived with leaves, but we still must face him without a sword for years to come. The way we still struggle to sleep but after 17 we stop wishing to stay trapped in our dreams. How do I tell this little child that needs a protector that even at 21 we are still not able to answer this question.
Instead, I say the simplest response I can without lying to them.
“Sometimes”
“Can I come back and see you again?”
“No, you will have to go through everything before we can see each other again. But know that it's going to be fine.”
I watch as she walks back towards their exit. Watching as I can feel the corners of my mouth slowly curling as I watch their hair bounce from every tiny step. Feeling the same pain in my legs tells us that it's time to close our eyes. But I can't, not until I watch their body disappear, watching as that pink nightie slowly fades and I know that she will be fine.
They will have to face the army of demons training in the darkest corner of their mind. Accumulate scars from those around her and by her own hands. A journey without a complete map that will lead her through rose thorns and ivy vines trying to trap them in one spot. To stop them from aging more than 10, 14, 17. But as I watch the space now empty, not even ruffled sheets to show we her body sat I know she will one day be fine, we will one day be truly fine.