After months of anticipation and goodbyes to my friends, school, and neighborhood the five of us got on the plane, me, my brother, my sister, Mom and Dad. I felt more like a family unit than ever as we entered the unknown together.
When we arrived at the Brussels airport after connections, a sleepless night, and a massive time change to a foreign country where we would now live, my siblings and I were excited to see the signs we couldn’t read, the food we didn’t usually eat, and there, yes, in the airport a Pizza Hut we recognized. They have Pizza Hut in Belgium too!? We marveled amongst ourselves.
I can only imagine how tired my parents were after moving their entire lives and their 10, 8, and 4-year-old overseas. Even for a practiced adult traveler jet-lag is a disorienting experience. For the kids the strange mix of excitement, fear, and exhaustion was new. We must have eaten something, maybe that Pizza Hut, and then checked into our hotel.
All five of us slept in the same room. This is adorable to think about now, it makes me love my young parents all over again like a child to think of us all in a hotel room together. As soon is at was late enough to call it “bedtime” we drew the curtains closed and all fell asleep. Hours passed, or weeks, I wasn’t sure when I woke up alone on my cot in the pitch black room. I scanned the edges of the curtains for daylight. Nothing, it must still be night. My eyes landed on the digital clock on the bed stand in the middle of the hotel room.
“0:00” it read.
“0 o’clock?!” Where am I? I thought. Have I stepped outside of time? Entered another dimension? Will the sun rise now that it is 0? Will morning ever come?
I wanted to cry out. I wanted my parents to comfort me, but the thought that they had disappeared in this new realm, on this new continent where time didn’t exist, stopped me from acting. That, and the fact that if my family was all still there somewhere in the dark, and I woke up my brother and sister, my parents wouldn’t be happy. I leaned into the darkness and listened. I heard their breathing, the four of them, in and out in the dark.
Even if time had ceased to exist they were there. We were there together.
I closed my eyes and sank back into the abyss.