Dispatch from a Colored Room

From the correspondence of Gauthier Leblanc, letter #2

It is with deep self-hate and melancholy that I write this, my Aimee, from an awful hole an octant away from you and your mother. We agonized over the decision, but ultimately we decided it was better for me to live elsewhere. 

It is out of love for you that I do this. Irregularities in my behavior caused by the chancre have led the superintendent to request my resignation, and it is best that I leave before they affect my relationship with you. I know this can only seem like a paltry explanation, whether you read it at two or twenty-two. If I am lucky, you will not even remember my absence before it is ended (I will be cursed with its memory until the end of my days). I have entrusted your care and that of your mother to my old friend Elias. You may find his manners rough, daughter, and his preoccupations odd, and I apologize in advance for any discomfort that follows from his attentions. But he is loyal to his own and full of determination. Whatever storms life (or the sky) sends, he will see you through them; the wind itself will not separate him from his goals.

(In the course of my parting conversations with my colleagues, I learned that Mme Brisbois recently had a poem published in a little journal called The Giant's Chair. She showed me the contributor's copy that they had sent, and mentioned a rate that struck me as quite generous in light of the quality of the work. I have had the germ of a poem in my head for some weeks now, thanks to an image that my old friend Elias has created; perhaps I will let it sprout and send it to the Giant's Chair, if we can spare the funds to post it.)

In small recompense for my separation from my family, I now room with my friend Jesson Desrosiers, another brother-in-arms from the 7th Ashview. For the nonce we occupy ourselves with day-labor, loading the trucks that bring food and botanicals to the higher terraces, unloading those that bring books, jewelry, weapons, spirits, electronics. I have never been insensitive to the differences between us peripherals, daughter, and those no better than us who live richer lives in the thinner air. But I have always seen fortune as the carcass of some roc or simurg, dead on the wing, and fate as the wind that brings it to the earth; and it has always seemed a noble thing to concentrate on extracting the marrow from one's own portion, rather than wring hands over whom the wind has favored. Yet I now pass many hours where my body is occupied and my mind free, and the most salient feature of those hours is how many of them are spent loading, and how few unloading. Perhaps what I have mistaken for the impartial wind is, in fact, the breath of some great giant, which moves birds where it likes, and takes credit for mercy when some bony songbird falls into a poor man's lap.

Your mother writes that you have learned to sit and crawl. She has promised me a heliotype when she can spare the fee. I should have sent a letter back, declining; the pain in her hands keeps her awake as it is, and I remember nights after she had done an extra hour of piecework to make the rent, when she could not sleep for weeping. But I could not refuse the offer. I only hope you can sit still enough to make it worth the cost. 

But then, however blurred the image, what could I thrill more to see than the daughter of my flesh, in motion?