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My Life: A Puzzle

by Natalia Aviña & Pedro Vela

My story is quite unbelievable, but it reminds me of how some things aren’t always the way they look. I was born and raised in Mississippi, child of a decent middle class family or at least that’s what I thought until a few weeks ago.

My childhood was pretty average, my father taught me to ride a bicycle and play baseball, nothing out of the ordinary, on the other hand, my mother used to bake daily, so the house was always filled up with a smooth vanilla or chocolate aroma. I was happy and so were they. The only thing that always crossed my mind was the fact that I didn’t exactly look like my parents, our characteristics were totally different, my mother was a tall white skinned, blond woman, my father was strong build, white skinned with short blond curly hair, every time this fact came to my mind, I used to simply let it go away. They always mention that if you don’t look like your parents you probably inherited characteristics from your grandparents or great-grandparents, the thing is that I had olive skin and black hair, and I hadn’t met any relatives because my parents said that they were all dead, considering this fact the previous idea didn’t help to calm me down and only made me question my origins even more.

Most of my life I followed the strategy of just living the day, which helped me to keep that idea away from my mind, but no matter how hard I tried it was always there on the back of my mind, and it always came back. I lived like that for quite a few years until everything changed one day. It was raining heavily, probably one of the worst storms that Mississippi had seen in the past decade, the windows rattled by the strong winds and part of the roof had been blown away, my parents left that weekend due to some business travel, so I was alone and frightened in the living room. The living room was a mainly white room surrounded by windows as my mother loved the natural light, but in these circumstances, it was one of the most dangerous parts of the house. I decided to go to my parent’s room and found some comfort in the place in which I used to go when I had nightmares as a kid, but some of the windows were already cracked and there was glass everywhere, I went into the wardrobe and tried to breath deeply, in this kind of situation not even a clear mind could help, I concentrated on my breathing for a couple  of seconds, but I was shaking, I tried to straighten up, but I hit my head with a box. I had never been in my parent’s wardrobe, but that box caught my attention, it was covered up with dust it looks like if it has been there probably for years without being moved.

        I opened the box and started to check it out, It was full of what looked like newspaper cutouts, I grabbed the first one, apparently it was about a boy named John Pound, at first the similarities between me and that boy were just pure casualty, but then I saw a picture of that boy, apparently this boy was kidnapped by a German couple ten years ago, then my breathing became heavier and my heart started beating faster, that boy looked exactly like me and the description of the German couple completely matched with the one of my parents. It was raining, but it didn’t worry me anymore, I have lived in a lie for over sixteen years, I step out of the wardrobe, I went down the stairs, opened the door and scream as loud as I could in the rain, I cried and I cried as I was unable to accept the truth.