What if?

"The police came." My mother had said one morning, her face filled with not so much as worry but simple confusion. After I knew what the whole ordeal was about, her calmness striked me.

I was shocked--in the only way a nine year old should be; scared but yet filled with the reassurance that everything would be okay.

It had turned out that my parents had been accused for something I knew they didn't, wouldn't of, and hadn't done. The people, in particular a person, the police had come for was a girl I didn't know how to describe--but she wasn't me.

But what if she had been?

And that night, as the story goes, the police had come in into our tiny two bedroom apartament with what I assumed was expectations in their minds that had been dictated by a mysterious and anonymous trouble maker. They had come into a place without a smoky scent lingering in the air and without the girl they had been looking for. In fact I was healthy, I was loved, and there had been no traces of the certain scars that would indicate the detail and the cerain evidence the police had been told to keep their eye on--the bullseye was way, way off even id the arrow was right on.

And those scars? What if they'd been as well as tattooed on my belly?

My parents had been falsely accused of being abusive to their eldest daughter, and I was told bh my parents that they had been accused of burning my skin with the scorching butts of their ciguarettes. I'd never touched a ciguarette in my life and my father had only used one in a different lifetime. My mother? She'd never touched a ciguarette in her life, nor anything that would make any person come up with the heinous idea of doing something to someone of their blood, even more so their own child.

But what if they did smoke?

The description I'd been given by my mother was blurry and vague, as I was only nine and I didn't need to have such visions of my parents, the people I'd always known, doing wrongful things when all their lives they'd been in the right. Despite my own reassurance, (for I was my own expirience and I was my only evidence and I was the anonymous caller's biggest concern), there came a thought in my mind that was frieghtning and that made me question my own sanity. Would my parents truly be capable of such things? Such unimaginable things? I'd been exposed to such limited pain, such massive care, such childish tendencies that it was unthinkable. My own inexpirience was my own encarcenation.

I found out that throughout the whole chaos, my parent's sudden surprise, the accusations and the checking, I had been silently asleep; they couldn't wake me up. I had been in such a deep sleep that I couldn't realize the world fluctuating around me.

But What if I had been awake?

The day after, I had cried for reasons I can't remember. The memory has faded away but the questions...they're still there. Here. Perhaps it was the sadness that came with imagining. Or the fact that even my teachers knew of my parents accusation and oh--how I prayed for the know it hadn't been true! They hadn't! They wouldn't! They'd never! But what if?

And yes, this event happened more than five years ago and the inevitable what-if still rises from the surface. What if I had been awake? What if I had heard what they had said about me and my parents? About my sister, so young, who had been sleeping as well? What had this anonymous caller said about someone so innocent and inexpirenced as she had been? What if I had checked my own skin? What if they'd--whoever they were, wether my parents or the police--had said more? I was a child but if I could imagine, could I not understand?

The following week after that night went by before my eyes; the mystery of the anonymous caller was still a mystery and it had affected us all. The thing died down quickly but with a certain sting, as I imagined a ciguarette would burn out when being collided with skin. (I had to wonder!) I asked my parents that week, yet they spoke with what I assumed was caution.

To this day, questions lay unanswered but some were distinct and in conclusion I came up with the fact that whoever it had been who had called had bad intentions, that sometimes not knowing is okay and that the what-if is inevitable.

I learned in the weeks after it, and even the years, that inevitable what if is only part of the expirience of the inexpirience I had been troubled with.

Because, in the end, no matter whatever happens that makes you question anything, there'll always be the greedy human crave of wanting to know more. The destined for curiosity. And the troubling answers that come with it.