There is a child standing on the front stoop of a house. She’s wearing a nightgown whose ruffled hem swims like rainbow fish around her legs. Her bare feet rock from heels to tiptoes on cracked concrete as she watches her father kick the kickstand of his motorcycle, turning the handlebars and walking it backward.

I don’t see the girl’s mother, but I know that she is there because the smell of cigarette smoke comes in waves through the open doorway. The girl is four. The girl is me. And she is living what I will always remember as my earliest memory.

There had been arguing, lots of angry words and tears behind hollow doors down the hall. For the girl, it felt like drowning. She sat with her brother on the living room floor escaping into episodes of Pink Panther, whose silent antics made them laugh and taught them that some stories were better told with no words at all. They ate cereal from plastic bowls, their sleeves soaked with milk wiped from their chins, cartoonish grins spread across their faces.

Now the door stands wide open. The girl is saying something to her father, but I can’t hear her small voice over the rumble of the motorcycle. She glances behind her into the dark cave of a hallway with cardboard boxes lined up like a life raft. When she turns back around, the motorcycle is backing out of the yard into the street like a boat pushing offshore, setting its sails into the wind. The father waves to her, but I’m not sure if she waves back because I’m watching her twist her thin hair around her finger.

Once when she played with a toy boat in the tub, she asked her mother where waves come from. “Well, the wind makes waves. And the tides.” She told her how the waves are smaller when the tide is low. But the child was too busy zooming the plastic boat around in circles to listen to the rest of it. Now as she watches the motorcycle disappear over the hill, she wonders if today is high tide, and she wishes she had paid more attention to her mother’s words.

Sitting on the edge of the yard, her feet on hot pavement, her fingers pop tiny bubbles of tar blistered by the sun. She hears her mother calling her. She climbs two steps and wades into the darkness, shutting the door behind her. Now she is in the hallway. She presses her nose to the boxes, breathing in that trace of raw wood pulp, a clean woody note, slightly sweet and musty.

This is her first time feeling the terror that love might vanish, and she doesn’t know what it means. I want to wrap my arms around her, hoist her onto my hip, kiss her warm cheek and tell her it’s okay, people will come and they will go. She doesn’t yet know that she will carry this feeling of helplessness for a lifetime. Someday she will be the one leaving, sailing away from friends and family without looking back, too afraid to drop an anchor, to choose love, to be the one who stays.

I want to knock on the door. Instead, I stand here revisiting my child-self over and over again because remembering feels like an act of love. And as much as I want to rescue the child, I know that we are oceans apart, and she hasn’t yet learned to swim.