It’s the first day of summer, their last summer before college starts.  Sandara Park, but her friends call her Dara or Sandy, is at the beach with her friends, celebrating the end of high school, the beginning of a new chapter in their lives.

 They put their stuff down and some went to play in the water and some played Frisbee or volleyball.  Dara was just laying on the beach towel, wanting to get some sleep, when she heard it again.

“Child, come home” it whispers, soothing and desperate all at once. 

Dara shot up of her position and immediately looked west.  She doesn’t understand it, this voice, the deep knowledge that west is home, it been happening to her since her childhood.

In first grade, a boy took her crayon.  She didn’t get mad, she simply saw, no,  remembers a memory, a life time, or a couple life time ago, when a little boy took a pen from a girl.  They weren’t children, perhaps in their teens.  She didn’t get mad, how could she, can he smiled at her so cutely.  Little 6 year old Dara shook those weird images away, not understanding.  So desperate to get her crayon back, she missed the gentle breeze that blew through the classroom, startling the teacher who had closed the door and all the windows before class started. 

Dara shook her head and laid back down, trying to ignore the whisper, but the seeds had been planted for so long, and it been growing.  There’s something inside her, desperate and clawing at her heart, singing a prayer of home.

She thought back, back when she heard it the first time. 

She was 10, playing outside