ALL SHOW NOTES ARE PROVIDED BELOW

LOCATION: GREYTON, SOUTH AFRICA

[00:00:00] Paige: My mom used to tell me that we lived in an infinite universe and that the galaxy contained many moons, planets, and stars. And amongst them all was us two possibilities in this universe. We would spend all night sitting on top of the trailer. We once called home, gazing up at the sky. We could not afford one of those fancy telescopes, so mom would make one from a toilet paper holder and clear foam.

[00:00:29] She would hold the makeshift telescope up to her eye and gaze in amazement at what she saw. I pretended to believe in whatever she saw, but to me, the stars all looked the same. She once taught me about valoria. She told me about the creatures that roam the lash green grass and the people who lived there.

[00:00:49] She said that they look like me and her dark brown skin, high cheekbones, and kinky brown. Some of them even had colored hair. No one believed her, not even me, when she wasn't sitting on rooftops casing up at the sky, she was wandering around town with a can of beer in one hand and a microphone in the other.

[00:01:12] She would scream that we were all doom and that the gods of the high moon were coming to destroy us. She was drunk. The town sheriff would knock on our front door and tell us they had found her out at the dried lake again. She would walk through the door smelling of beer and wet dirt. The sheriff would give her a trespassing fine, and she would go back up to the roof and wait.

[00:01:38] Rick, her latest husband, would throw something at the wall cursing about another bill We had to pay when it was safe. I would follow her up to the roof, come. She would say to me as I poked my head up over the ledge, I would leave my shoes at the edge and go sit on her. She looked so beautiful as the wind blew through her hair and the light of the moon reflected of her dark skin.

[00:02:04] The last night I saw her, she kissed the top of my forehead and told me that she had to go. I held her tighter that night. I didn't know what going meant. I was only six at the time, and just starting grade school, you see that bright light she said pointing to the brightest star in the. We lived millions of miles away from the nearest skyscraper, so the stars shined a lot brighter out here tonight we could see them all, including the one she called, the light of Valoria.

[00:02:39] It sat perfectly underneath the mountains that welcomed many to our small town. That's the light of Valoria, that's home. She whispered in my ear. I smiled as she hugged me closer. I wanted to go there, even if it was a figment of her imagination. At six years old, it was better than the trailer with falling doors.

[00:03:04] She didn't take me with her. Later that night, she put me to bed and left the smell of beer and wet dirt went with her. No one went looking for her. No one put up missing person posters. No one canvased the neighborhood. Silently. She went unnoticed in the dark, but the damage she caused when she was here, stayed with me long after she was gone.

[00:03:30] It started in fifth grade when we had to bring in an item for show and tell Mr. Fritz, our overly talkative teacher, instructed every student to bring in a family heirloom. He was specific about the item he wanted us to show off to the. It must be during your grandparents' era. He shouted to the class. He never spoke in an inside voice.

[00:03:56] He claimed to have lost his hearing Years ago during some more. During this time, Rick had moved us from the condemned trailer in Elm subdivision to a four by four near the downtown square. It was the only place he could afford and the money he was receiving from unemployment was slowly running. The tiny apartment only had one bedroom, and the walls were reeked of mold and onion soup, a bad combination.

[00:04:23] But over time, the scent began to fade. Our neighbors across the whole sold soup at the local farmer's market On weekends. Mrs. Silverman said her soup could cure anything, but first you had to conquer the smell. There was a rumor among the neighborhood kids that she cooked human body parts in her. I once asked her if it was true and she laughed, but never confirming if the rumor was true.

[00:04:49] I searched our entire apartment for any item that might belong to my grandparents. Rick had thrown out much of my mother's belonging or sold them at the rest stop for chunk change. The only thing left of hers was a box that contained some of her clothing newspaper clippings from 10 years ago, and some strange looking rocks.

[00:05:10] I couldn't pass off any of those items as belonging to my grandparents, and I couldn't possibly tell my class that my grandparents were stuck on some planet far away in the galaxy. I finally decided to take one of my mom's favorite sweaters. The sweater was purple with a bright yellow star in the middle.

[00:05:29] It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen, but it would work for this assignment. When it was my time to stand up in front of the classroom to fabricate the story of how my grandmother crafted the sweater, the entire class laughed. At first, I was baffled, but then John Gray, the class clown, stood up and shouted girl from valoria.

[00:05:52] Soon the entire class began to chant in unison. Mr. Fritz tried his best to calm the class down, but the madness had already begun. The kids chased me home from school that day, still chanting girl from Valoria. Rick sat on the couch with his hundredth beer for the day in his hand and the TV blasting. He didn't notice my tears or dear to care.

[00:06:19] I rushed past him and locked myself in my room. My room was my haven, and years later it would become my prison. I wished it had ended that day, but the name calling only grew worse over time. It went from girl, from Valoria to a freak to the girl with the crazy mother. It was hard to hide in a town with only 5,000 people.

[00:06:45] Everyone knew you and everyone knew your past. Any new person moving into town was immediately made aware of your troubles. They didn't care to fix it. They didn't care to hold your hand. A news reporter once came to town a few years ago for an assignment on the missing sheep out by Mr. Willis's farm.

[00:07:06] Once he had caught the whim of my mother's disappearance, he was knocking at our door. My mother's disappearance was far more interesting than a story about sheep that were probably just let out of the pen by some trouble making teenagers. I was in my room when the knock on the door came. I cracked the door of my bedroom open to get a peek at the visitor.

[00:07:29] No one ever came to see us. The reporter was much taller than Rick, so it was funny watching him hover over the invincible. Rick, Catherine, Rick didn't let the man get a second sentence in before he scared him away. What the shotgun he kept by the door. That didn't stop. The news reporter from publishing the.

[00:07:51] My mother's disappearance Remerge on the front page paper that Monday, the headline Read, Mother Abandon Child for Aliens. The article never spoke about my mother's life when she wasn't walking around town with a microphone or her many rants about the Gloria of Vallor and how she sang the sweetest melodies to me each night before.

[00:08:13] Instead, it talked about how deranged she was and that only a mentally incapacitated person could leave their child to seek life on another planet. After the article was published, it went from name calling to rocks being thrown at me. I was truly the town's freak. They stuffed extra copies of the newspaper article in my desk.

[00:08:36] The school officials tried their best to protect me, but even they could not fight back the fits of laughter they got while reading the article. Let me get this right. Your mother decided to join a cult that believed in the existence of aliens on another planet. They would ask me, No. She didn't believe in aliens.

[00:08:57] She believed that we were born on another planet. I would try to explain to them, they would laugh harder after that. To my mother. It was true. She wasn't from Earth. She never explained how she got here, but she knew in her mind Earth wasn't home, but it didn't matter right now. She was long gone and I was stuck cleaning up her mess.

[00:09:22] The news reporter came back a year later and wanted to apologize for the article. I was in the seventh grade by then. He said he might have evidence that my mother was still alive. Rick didn't scare him away this time. I stood behind my room door listening to the conversation. A bank in Johannesburg states that a saving account has been set up for Jordan.

[00:09:48] He said, Who set up the account? Rick asked him. The bank said it was a woman fitting the description of Lilly. I sang to the floor and cried silent. It was the first time I wasn't crying from the kids in the neighborhood, but because of my mother, a part of me still hoped she was still alive. Now I was sure she was out there somewhere.

[00:10:13] The next morning we made the four-hour drive from the western part of South Africa to Johannesburg. It was my first time out of the circle of great. Rick and I sat in the back of Old Man Willie's truck as the truck trudged through the desert planes and mountains. The reporter was right. A saving account had been open for me.

[00:10:35] The bank allowed Rick to withdraw $5,000 and told us to return in another month for the next withdrawal. As long as I was alive, the money was mine, even though I was never allowed to touch it. Rick had spent much of the money at the local gambling houses. He never once won a game, often returning home broke and drunk.

[00:10:59] I was 13 when the chain was embedded on my room door. It was the first time I tried to escape. I had made it far as route five before the sirens came. Blasting from a distance. There was no way I could escape on foot. I had to try another. As long as there is money in that account, you're not going anywhere.

[00:11:21] He said drilling the chain lock on the door. I had become a prisoner in my own room. The chain was kept up on the days he left town to go to the casinos. I spent the time locked up drawing pictures of the sky because it was the only thing I could see from my bad window. A part of me also hoped that if I kept drawing the sky, I would finally see what my mom saw years ago and she would come back.

[00:11:48] It had been 10 years.