Dear Mother, Dear Father by Abigail McGovern

Dear Mother, Dear Father

by Abigail McGovern

*Inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave*

Dear Mother, dear Father,

I thought the world was ending the first time I saw the sky. There was just so much. So much light, so much space. A color I don’t even have a name for. There is nothing like this where I grew up. It looked like the edge of collapse, like a hole in the world, and it opened something inside me too. At home, I had thought that sky meant shadow, meant ending, meant the boundaries of our world.

In the cave there is no such thing as space or movement. So I am glad to know the world is big enough to make me feel small. I want things I didn’t know were possible to want—to breathe, to grow.

I know that you think children should stay where they are put. And that you put us in the dark for a reason. But I cannot bring myself to say that I am sorry for leaving. For so long, we saw the world in two dimensions—flickering shadows and unsteady light. I thought that’s all there was. I thought that’s all I was.

Out here, I could see nothing at first. Because of everything I had missed, everything I had never known existed. I still don’t have names for all the things that exist out here—that live and grow and move—all the colors.

Rain.

I didn’t know that water could come from anything other than a cup or a bowl. The feeling of it against my skin…One day I will learn all of the words and I will find one big enough for that feeling.

And I saw a cat today. I have seen cats before, rippling across the cave walls, and I knew it when I saw its shape. But it….it leaps and bounds and plays. It is patterned with so many colors. And I am told they are all different from one another? Each its own thing. Every one of them will be….more…than all of the ones I ever thought I saw in the cave.

Why would you ever keep this from us?

Oh, you loved us, I know that. But only in the way you love things

that you fear will break if too roughly handled—held close to your chest, locked away. Mother, Father, you kept us from ourselves.

And I know this because while I knew we all sounded different, and thought different, I never thought of myself as something separate. We all looked the same, cut from the same cloth, shadows on the wall. We knew the same things and wanted the same things only because there was nothing to want. But now I have seen myself. And there was a self to see. I want to know what the others look like, what colors they like, what creatures.

I want to know who they are, but more than that, I want to give them the chance to know themselves.

You will say that you were protecting us. Because even in my short time up here, I have seen that the outside world can be brutal. There is blood and betrayal, corruption. War. Brother against brother, bodies in fields. But you were wrong. That does not outweigh the sight of the setting sun or the feel of wind in hair or what it is like to laugh with other people, to move freely, to choose who you want to be. To know that there is more than one thing to be.

I will always have scars from the chains, from your efforts to keep us in one place. In attempting to shield us from the darkness of this world, you have plunged us into the shadows of another. Like scars are the memories of pain, it seems to me that shadows are the memories of life.

I am sick to death of memories. I am ready for the moment.

I am afraid, yes. Of all that is new and all that is uncertain and how big the world really is. But, Mother and Father, unlike you I will not be bound by my fear.

I am imagining you making excuses. Begging me to come back, pleading with me to forget all that I have seen and all that I now know.

I will be back, you don’t have to worry about that. But I will never again be chained.

Never again step into the darkness, never again mistake a shadow on the wall for any real representation of life. That is not a life worth having.

When I come back, I am setting them free.

I am pulling the others into the light with me. One by one if I must. Whatever it takes.

I can finally see.

So Mother, Father, brace yourselves for me.