Alexei had become Grandfather’s newspaper articles, and I was inventing my own secret language. Except these graffiti words were not being crossed out, but rather added to, the way Kosma added to Sonya, who added to Natalia, who added to me. It was a revelation of sorts, to learn this different technique; to make the world say what it did not say.
Ukraine was a relieving place, not in the sense it was better, but in the simple fact that it was very much not. It rescued my silent hope (that was also fear) for England—the place of fog and umbrellas. The place of angels. The place of coastlines and ocean-filled sleep. The place stars had gazed upon.
The place without The Walls.
“Where do ya think you’re going?” Kosma called from behind, his younger legs stirring up the path dust like the smoke from Alexei’s cigarettes.
Good question. I wasn’t certain if I was living by thoughts anymore. Maybe I never had, and that was precisely why I had been able to escape Russia.
“You’re going the wrong way! The Poland border is to the west.”
Natalia and I slowed to a sheepish stop out front of a damaged building, which looked like a fire had eaten half of it, before diverting its appetite to the apartment lines of St. Petersburg. I took guilty pleasure in that brilliant, flaming imagining—my place to live lighting up with gold again, with the warmth of her again. A burning, golden home among the dull grey.
Kosma soon reached our side, with Sonya scampering not far behind him, her bare feet dirty from gardening the Bosworth Field.
“We need to catch the edgy kid, before his devils catch him first,” I stated matter-of-factly. My heart was racing, and I kept picturing the sunset we’d seen on our beginning walk, when it was only three of us, and understood now that Alexei had graffitied it there—right there in the blue sky—for me to snap photographs of.
He was alive somehow. He had resurrected from his icy pond grave to teach the world a life lesson. Like Jesus, or something of equally distant past. An immortal rebel.
Natalia added to my sentiment. “Show us the way, Kosma,” she ordered, direct and dauntless as ever.
Sonya, on the other hand, seemed lost in the depths of her mind, and I was sure she'd lose her grip on the bread bags she carried. “Devils…” she mumbled, with an expression that held both confusion and insight.
As I had been observing Sonya, Kosma had advanced a few meters ahead of the group. “Well? Are you coming?” he asked, although it was more of an interrogation.
And that was where our second journey commenced, as the four of us traversed the twisted maze of Ukraine’s historical scars and bruises.
And it was in that moment, Inheritor, when I remembered the glass cut on my finger, and realised that it, too, would likely become a scar one day.
You will find that life goes on irrelevant to those scars, and that people make places to live inside of them. That is what the world actually says, when nothing is added or crossed out.
But I have always been an idealist.
Gender:
Points: 2387
Reviews: 92