Black and White

Grow up, we sang, a foot or two until I’m grown. And when I’m grown I’ll go. When I’ve grown a foot or two, I’ll go, I hope. We sang for years those words, no tears. The tears come now, the words still echoing in the air around us, the air around those extra feet we grew. Not real feet, not like octopi, not like we thought when we were younger. But height feet, normal feet, we are adults now.

But we aren’t. We are teenagers, barely graduated from high school. We know nothing about the world. Nothing about the world which we are called to change, nothing about the world which we know will fight against us every single time we open our mouths. We know nothing about the fight they will fight. We know nothing about how to fight back. We won’t fight back. We don’t fight.

This is about love and life, they say. This is about caring and sharing, like in elementary school. This is about showing the world that you are not of it. This is about showing everyone in the world that they don’t have to be either. This is about an escape route. An escape route from the darkness. A door to let in the sun, and an umbrella to keep you dry, even when you are drowning in all the rain of the world.  This is about families and eternity and remembering and saving everything that is important on earth.

So we go. We call our doctors and our dentists and our bishop. We make appointments and appointments and we fill out forms so many forms so many times our names so many pictures in a suit and tie so many teeth next to us after all our wisdom is gone.  We work, and we don’t take our girlfriends on lots of dates because they know we are saving up for our mission. But we spend time together, lots of time, because we know we are saving up for our mission. 

Saving up for two years without newspapers or facebook or phone calls or skypes or dates or after school Sonic runs. So we spend time together. Lots of time. Trying to engrave on our minds the way that everything is so that when we are gone, we can remember and return, though we know we will never be the same.  

But we work so we can go. And we are happy to go. But where will we go? We don’t know, but He does. And we ask Him; we send papers and files and pictures to Salt Lake and they send us back a letter. A big white letter in a big white envelope. The letter is black words on a page, but it feels like gold. It is heavy in our hands and we open it slowly. Our family screams. We cry. We are going, going, going somewhere we have never been before.  Going somewhere we can’t find on a map yet, we need to get the bigger map. The letter tells us to report to the training center on March Twenty Sixth, and we scream.

We scream with excitement and they scream with excitement and now all anyone ever says to me is about excitement, or encouragement, or commitment, or not paying rent, or not going to college yet, or not marrying my girlfriend of two years because I promised myself I would do this first.

And she waits.

And everything is all about black now. Black socks to match my pants. Black suits to meet the dress code. Black ties for looking nice. Black bags for carrying my life in. Black pens for writing home with.

And blue books to teach from. Blue books to give away with a prayer and a promise.

And everything is black now, except my white shirt. And my white name on the black tag. The black tag I clip to my white shirt after everything has been done. The black space between me and my mother disappears as I hug her for the last time. The last time for two years. And the whites of her eyes disappear as I walk through the airport. And the white of my smile stays.

I readjust my name tag.