Letters to the Front [Uxue]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

Dear Taylor,

I miss you.

Mamá has resigned herself to the fact that I’ll be moving out when you come home, and so she’s started to spend every moment she can with me. We walk to the fields together in the morning, and I’ve started to grow accustomed to the way that she tells me all of the stories from before things turned out this way. She’s said that when she was a girl that they lived in a big city along the coast, with electricity that didn’t short in the afternoons. She said that she used to want to grow up to be a doctor when she was my age. We spent an afternoon talking about how my father might try to talk to the some of the Calloways to see if I might not sit in on some of the doctors visits across the district.

I don’t know if that’s what I really want, but it is nice for her to think about me that way. I don’t know if it helps to think about when all of this is over for you or not. I guess it might be insensitive for someone like me to think about how the world might look without being out at the edge of the world. I can’t help it, though. I know you wanted me to come with you to help but I couldn’t leave Xuxu alone. Not with my mother and father never around, and with all the rest of us worrying about who might be coming to the door.

She’s started working on my wedding dress. She says that she thinks we’re a little young but that two of my father’s brothers were married before they were twenty, so she says I’m just taking after him. I know she’s wrong about it though. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more sure of anything in my entire life.

Do you know that when you asked me, I felt like all the stars at once opened up and the whole world grew brighter than I could see? It’s why I closed my eyes, not because of the tears that I had. It’s that every time we’re together, I know that the world is still. That things will be safe when we’re holding hands because we face what’s out there together. I think about how we used to sit out by the river and skip rocks, and you would tell me that how you wanted the world to look.

‘We should all have a shot to earn our place.’ You would tell me, and I’d sit, and listen. See, I heard you!

‘Not because of who you know or how much you have. We should all be able to share in that. But a better world means freedom for all of us, not just a few. We don’t have to be in this alone, because the greatest thing is knowing that we’re all looking to see each other succeed and not to fail.’

I think about how you looked by the river at night, how much you cared that this world was a just and fair place. That’s the man that I want to marry, to hold, to see come home.

I love you. Please stay safe.

Your Love,
Uxue Izar

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

Dear Taylor,

Yesterday they came around to knock at each of our doors to ask if we believed in the capitol.

The man who came to see us was with two men dressed in white, and said that he’d just been to the Velez place. He told us that they were sitting around the kitchen table and listened to him speak, that they had been told that there were rumours that they would supporting rebels. I can still see it, too, them sitting at their old wooden table, with the flower wall paper behind them. They have a kid that can’t be older than three, and another four that are old enough to head out into the fields.

They took Javi. They said that he’d been passing off rations to the rebels, and that he’d taken some information from the granary to give to them. When they grabbed him they said his wife screamed and tried to fight them, and that they beat her head in, right in front of her three-year-old.

Papá said that we’ll take the little one for now, until things are more quiet.

We didn’t tell them much. They know my father is a good man, that does his best and works his hardest. People come to rely on him because he doesn’t put himself above the rest of them, and gives back what he can. I’m proud of him, how brave he was speaking with them, and being honest. They didn’t ask me any questions, but I stood with my mother and Xuxa in the living room while they spoke at the front door. One of the men waved to me and smiled. He said I was pretty.

I looked at the floor and wished he never existed.

I don’t claim to know how the world can be a better place when we’ve been fighting for so long. But I do know the world can’t be a place for all of us to live if we have to step on one another to do it.

I’m sorry for writing this to you but I can’t stop thinking about how things are getting worse here.

Please write back to me soon – I miss you. I think about how when you get back we’ll be able to have our own little place, all to ourselves. There’s a patch of land the rest of my cousins don’t want, up along the river where it bends, and there’s a whole patch of trees. The place on the hill where we carved our names.

Your Love,
Uxue Izar