I always said I would show you the stars.
Not those blurry few, dotted in the rose-gray sky over the city at night. Proper stars. Real stars in a sky like black and blue velvet. Clustering, aching, stars like you only see out in the mountains, away from the ground.
You and me were so young when they took us down into the city. You were only a baby— you fit in my hands. I don't think you had ever even touched the ground. Your eyes weren't even their proper color yet.
- -
You promised me.
I don't remember the forest where we were born. I don't remember the trees.
We were so young when they took us from there. You were only eleven. You cried. I can tell that you cried. The stains never washed off even after all those years.
You and me spent my whole life here. You and me. Just us. You looked out for me, and you brought me up on filtered water as much as you could but the food tasted wrong all the same. How could I even know what "wrong" tasted like? You would promise me:
"Just you wait, little sister. I'll show you how to hunt and to ride and to fish and to climb things. I'll show you how to sleep in trees like a panther, and we'll make gardens in the spring when the mountains thaw and streams spring up."
- -
I fed you what I found that was living. The dead food was cheaper and the work was so bad, but I did it for you. I wanted you to grow up strong, be able to chase me when we finally lived in the sun again. I counted every bit that I made, and I always had enough to feed us two, even keep warm— but nothing more, my little sister! Nothing to help us away, past the wall at the end of all roads. I was not strong enough to escape with you too. I might have left alone. My dear trees!
But you were all I loved. I had to save us both. I had to. I thought then that I had enough time— I didn't—
- -
Why did they take you so far away from me?
You loved me so well. Your hands were the only ones that never hurt, the only voice that never cursed... you were everything I loved. You and me. You raised me to hunger for a home I'd never seen: you instilled that thirst for the stars in me. You fed me everything in your heart till I almost knew what grass was like.
Then you left me— put a rolled paper in your dark hand and you left me. I didn't know why. And you didn't say why. You just left me, one day. Hanneth! What did they make you do? What did that soft look mean as you knelt at my feet and put both of my arms round your neck? You looked peaceful, Hanneth. You looked sad.
"I will take you." You said. "I will come for you some day. I swear it. I will take you far, far away, and I will teach you to live free. I promise."
- -
I did not know that you'd wait this long.
I did not know your wings would grow stiff over time: I knew atrophy was a condition. I knew that the gray walls were too thin and narrow. I did not know I would look back, one day, and be gone: I did not know that I would be lost to you.
Little sister, I did not know.
I never taught you how, but you climbed up old fire escapes. You would sit on flat roofs and watch smoke from the factories. I never taught you how, but you lived. You grew up. You grew up strange, and narrow, and bricked-in, and flourescent-bleached: your hair was always tied. Your feet were always bound. Your hands were always dry. I never taught your eyes to see color that way.
I would have wept, if I still had eyes.
You did not know anything outside the walls. Your life was encompassed by a few dull blocks of the road. You were barely alive. You were waiting. For me.
You waited for me. And you loved me!
Sister, I came! My soul flew to you, not the mountains— surely that speaks of something!
- -
I never learned how to be alive, Hanneth. I never learned how. I learned to feed myself, and even to keep warm, but there was nothing else in the city but dust and cracked paint.
Only iron.
I waited for you, darling brother. I waited so many long years, and grew soft and stiff-limbed in captivity, but I thought "when I'm freed, if I am just freed soon, there will still be enough of me left. I will learn to love stars. I will change. It will not be too late."
Then one day I realized I had not thought of trees, or you, or the stars, in a week. And when I tried to— you told me how it feels to climb an alder-tree in a storm— I could neither imagine its sound, nor convince myself I could climb anything other than a flight of steps. I realized more; that I could not hear the way you did, even with so little of your life spent in freedom. My broken ears, deafened with years of the metal and wire, could scarce pick the sound of speech out of that of wheels.
And I looked at last, in the glass walls, and realized that I was older, now, than you were when you left.
- -
It took you two hours.
Two hours and sixteen attempts to get yourself over the wall, and you took nothing with you. You could carry nothing.
I sat on the wall, and I watched you. You must have heard my song; you looked, and you said "just hold on, I am coming."
You dropped and you got up and, too tired to run, you stumbled out into the darkness. And you were alone.
Little sister.
Little sister, as brave as I ever was; as brave as you were to grow up so trammled and smoke-fed in that city of men; as brave as you were to keep waiting, so long, without even a word from your Hanneth; as brave as it would have been, for you to leave your world and run away with me... little sister, I never have seen... for all that I have done, anything half so brave as you, stumbling, all out of breath, in the dark.
Running home.
Running without me.
