Paper Stars

Prologue

“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. […] But all these stars are silent. You—you alone will have stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living.”

― Antoine de Saint - Exupéry,

“The Little Prince”

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Prologue

The war began with fire and ended in ice. That was how I saw it, and little has changed since. First there was a sky blemished by flames followed by a bitter earth swallowed whole by marching lines of snow. Between each image lay a thousand gradients and shades of human life and death, and these lines were blurred so often we had trouble telling the difference. As time went on and separated me from the life that had once been mine and ours, I wrapped my memories in barbed wire. I kept them there, just as those men had done unto us all of those many years ago—years that sometimes passed no slower than a stanza of a song. I have trouble seeing time in the way it should be seen: in minutes and hours and days. Often I find myself measuring in stars, in the steady birth of colours from what had once been only greyscale film. Sometimes, I close my eyes and see how much I can remember: when my little sister smiled, which of her front teeth were missing?—which tobacco was my father’s favourite?—what colour had the walls of my childhood room been painted?—and upon which side of his breast had that golden star been sewn? The less I can recall, the more time I know has passed since everything burned and froze in turn.

The war began with fire and ended in ice, yes, but that was behind me. That was buried deep in the German earth along with those whose lives had come to a close with one or the other: it was hard to say which. When it ended, I salvaged what I could and stumbled along at first; it took a very long time to learn how to walk and run again. War makes you forget the funniest things, you know. That being said, I’ve had ample time to teach myself how to live again. Every bad thing undergone was rolled up and tucked away in some sad, dusty part of my mind and left to decompose. I couldn’t pick and choose what ended up there. If I had that luxury, I would have been able to think of the notch in his brow and the rasp in his voice and smile instead of weep. But I still survived. I survived, and will continue to survive for as long as I can; humans are good at that sort of thing.

* * *

Oh lord, look at that: I fear this old woman has developed a habit of babbling.

But you see, it took a very long time for things to feel okay again. I had to pick up my pieces, and found it difficult to figure out which way they fit back together, for even when they did, there were always cracks. However, I will tell you now that, eventually, everything became comfortable and as it should be. My great branching tree had grown once more from the ashes from which it was sewn: I had pulled out weeds as best as I could and tried my hardest to keep my thick, weather-worn skin sheltered from decay and other poisonous things. What else could I do, after all?

Life goes on, and I had grown happy with how things turned out. That is, until I ruined everything with a heart attack. To be quite honest, I still don’t understand what all the fuss was about: I could fill a book with more severe things, and I’ve certainly weathered worse. Not to say that my husband and I have been the exact paradigm of health over the past decade. A prosthetic leg that was once light and easy to manoeuvre for a young man can seem a mighty burden to an old one, and I’m certainly no spring chicken, either. But the fact of the matter is that the whole affair was nothing more than a gross overreaction. I can pledge this with complete candour, as I’ve never been one for hyperbole.