The Borders in Our Veins

3

I wake up just before the sunrise so I can watch it crest over the hills in its pinks and yellows, painting the sky that drapes over corners of the world I'll never get to see. I've milked the goat already, strained her milk in the main house and set it in the ice box. Now I'm walking her and her kids out to the pasture on long black ropes, guiding them through wooden tangles of fences. We alternate their pasture every couple months, so the clover and the nettle and the yarrow and all the other plants that feel like home to me, can grow back and start all over again. I don't need to be back at the main house until everyone's had their simple breakfast of oats, so they can go chop wood and finish fixing the fences, or the women can harvest and weed. I'll get started on bathing the children and making up some craft ideas to float the time by quicker. I'll get started looking at the pile of vegetables and eggs and grains we have on storage and imagine what new creation I can come up with (my one channel of art).

But right now, in this pocket of time, the world is mine, and the goats are chewing on goosefoot - and they don't know about pain and borders and homes that used to be homes. They only know about the green hues around them and the warm beat of the sun on their backs.

I feel so sick; a hole ripped in my stomach.

I've brought a pen and paper out to the field, tucked under my waist band. I lay with my stomach down to the earth and spread the paper flat, getting it wet in the drops of dew, but it's the best I've got. I won't send it anyway. I just... I just want to feel what it's like to write. I want to remember how letters curve; how they pour out if you. It's almost a magic. I haven't written in years, except for copying prayers and hymn lyrics so I can teach the children to recite them. Not that they'll ever learn how to read - they're not supposed to have any way of knowing anything other than what the church tells them. This pen is a rebellion; this pen is...

I sigh and perch it at the edge of the page, illuminated in the pastels of the yellow pink sunset. My writing is choppy and rusty when it used to flow out of me. It feels like an old friend I'm trying to re learn the steps of an old dance with. Me and my pen... me and the inner palaces I used to make of it, notebooks and notebooks in my room back home. Back home. Back...

"A,

There is no way to get you this letter. But I like to think if I read yours one by one and reply one by one, there might be some way to reach you - some way through the air or the clouds or the sky, some tendrils that might wrap around you and make you think of me or make you feel warmer or make you hear my name in the wind. To be inside all the sunbeams. Anything. Surely these words must travel - they can't end with me, can they?

My throat hurts with the tears and words I'm keeping in it. I have felt sick since I saw your penmanship on the front of the envelope and knew it right away, knew it better than my own hand. A, I thought time might dilute it...

I am now sick to discover that it has not diluted it at all but rather that there is some dull ache my life has only built up on top of. Year by year, in layers. And if you slice through them all, like you have, you'll find it right below the surface. This dull ache, it's... missing home. Missing those memories you're speaking about and the girl I was in them. The ache of childhood dreams collapsing shut (I really believed them, you know. I really believed the world could be as beautiful as it seemed from the ledge of that castle looking out at the river). God, I miss you, A. There is an ache where you used to be beside me. I don't know how to deal with this except to not feel it. Except to think about each hour by hour and not how tired my legs and arms and eyes are at the end of each day and how empty my stomach feels and how much I feel like Prometheus pushing the stone up a hill. It's easier, so much easier, when I can almost forget there was no other way. Like someone down the road who keeps their cow closed in the barn, but it grew up there since it was a calf so it's never known pastures.

I've known pastures, A. It's a gift I wouldn't trade for the world, but these walls are suffocating. Suffocating and invisible; but where else could I go? The world outside of them makes me want to shrink into my skin. I wish I was there to hug you when you heard about your dad. I can hear your screams from here. I want to wrap every bit of hope around you even if I have none of it left much for myself - I'd find some to give you. I'm so sorry, A. I'm so sorry. I'm getting tears on this paper now, god damn it.

I shouldn't say that; so many words I shouldn't say. Not just invisible fences but invisible chains sometimes too. At the monastery yesterday I was so hungry but I knew the food in the middle of the aisle was for the feast day at the end of the week and Uncle Luko said if we had enough faith we wouldn't feel hungry and that that's why this fasting period is so hard. I felt my hand reaching for it, like I was testing myself, and realized my hand was wrapped in chains I couldn't see.

Do you remember coming here in the summers, A? I haven't been remembering it, trying to push all these memories away like they're someone else's, someone who died's, but you've opened them all back up again. And I think you calling me Sia is like a dam lifted and I'm not sure if I want to close it again. (No one uses that name for me except you, still).

I see you right here, right in front of me, we're fourteen and we're taking our shoes off right here past this wooden fence I'm sitting at. I hate wearing shoes, I'm going to slide them off right now just for old time's sake. Remember spreading our arms up wide to the sun and letting our toes dig in the grass? Do you remember they were trying to find us for lunch, and we had this idea we could tumble down from the top of this whole hill and land on the road down there? We were always running, like there was too much to see and not enough time to see it in. I wish we saw more before the walls came up. My throat hurts again, telling me there's no use wishing.

But do you remember how magical this was, A? Do you remember looking at the sunflowers and watching the bees? Thinking about how it all works together, every single puzzle piece of nature? And remember we planted those seeds in April and came back again in July and saw what they became, what those seeds had in them all along?

It's still true. All that magic is still true. The feeling when we could run barefoot in the rain and pick our own fruits fresh off the trees and collect the eggs and mill our own grains and sit in a circle beside the campfire cracking open walnuts to put in jars for the year... and looking up at the stars and putting our phones away because they didn't want the internet waves around us... we felt so free, remember? I remember knowing I wanted to live in the country (I know you still wanted to live in the city), but I felt like a bird put in a cage there sometimes and I just wanted to feel that magic of looking over the hills and seeing it so full of life and without walls and borders between creatures and plants and soil. Vast and infinite and something I was in, not separate from. I wanted to belong like that, right in the fabric of it, and I thought this was the closest I could get. I didn't know... I couldn't see it clearly. I didn't know what it might become... Or having you here beside me summer after summer might have tainted it all in gold or something, or maybe Aunt Vera changed, I don't know A, I don't know... because the magic is still here but mostly it's inside of me and inside my memories, and so I know what you mean when you say you hold onto greener images while the world is grey.

Some things stayed green, like the animals and the plants and the feeling when I climb the cherry tree and look over the horizon and know how big and beautiful and interwoven the world is. And you, your letter. Your letter is so real, so filled with a beating heart, I wouldn't know what to do with it anymore.

I'm not sure if you'd like me anymore, A. I catch my reflection on the angle of sun hitting the window sometimes and I look like a stranger to myself. I don't know where "me" is really. Where is it located? In my appearance? Gone. In my hobbies? Gone. In my thoughts? Hardening and drying and dripping away until they feel foreign to me. In my memories? I'm forgetting them. I don't know where "me" is or how you'd draw a line around her. Where she begins and ends. What part of her is a piece that moves in something bigger, something she might not want.

But then I am here and I am writing to you and it defies reason, and it makes me think there is something in me dying to get out and maybe that's me. Maybe that's where I still live.

Does it give the prisoner more pain to dream of the pastures or accept the walls? I don't know, but for today, my feet are here but I live inside your words.

Love always,
Si."