Chapter 20

Marco, now that I’m running out of paper, even the letters of your name are precious.  I’ve already written on both sides.  When I look back to the first letter I wrote you, I regret not writing in smaller print.  Why do they bother teaching us to write when we are young if paper is so scarce?

Calculating how many pages I might have saved had I written smaller at the beginning, I know even when yielding to my original request for paper they set me up to fail.  They designed the concession to break me, to convince me of the virtue of efficiency and the advantages of digital storage.  Once I add this last page to the bottle, little room to spare, I won’t be able to pull the other pages back out.  One day when we are together, we’ll have to smash the bottle before reading my letters.  You will see that time has only strengthened my resolve.  I am more committed to you and your way of life than I have ever been.

Where they thought I would come to love efficiency and the storage advantages of the flat screen, the portability of the mini, I have only come to resent their coldness.
Without you, everything is cold.

In other times people must have loved what was rare, the way our parents crave trace.  Parents work that much harder for productivity bonuses when they can spend them on trace; a hug, common and self-made, means little to them.

I forgive you, Marco, for making me hunger for your physical presence the way our parents hunger for trace.  My first month here, I blamed you for that longing.  More than once I cursed your name.  Why couldn’t you make an exception for me?  Why couldn’t we both conform and email and chat and share video chat to pass the time?  I could have at least seen your stare, that smirk, and you hair as restless in the wind as your spirit.

Maybe you would have made an exception to your code had you known I’d be institutionalized.  Maybe we could have shared a standard life together with digital tech and the actuator.

There’s no looking back now.  I’ve been here so long without you that I would never settle for less than the real thing.  They don’t know the power of the real thing, a power time and distance fails to dim.

When you read this, if we are together then, make sure to hold me.  Hold me when you get this far.  Whatever my courage, I will be scared.  I have found that courage and fear are not mutually exclusive.

Did you teach me that or did I teach myself? 

Other than my commitment to you and our way, I’m afraid you’ll think I’ve changed.  I’ve discovered meanness in me that I struggle to suppress.  The list of people I’ve blamed for my condition would be anything but efficient.  I’ve blamed everyone but myself.

Tonight that changes.  Tonight, short on paper, I make myself yours in a corner of my heart the rationale’s cold stare will never reach.  In that corner I rewrite the past.  I don’t ask Vidalia for her consent or witness.  I don’t ask anyone’s approval.  You offer me your hand, and I take it.

We would have been married--our way of life preserved by the rationale’s concession to grandfathered practices--if not for me.  Whatever its preferences, the Mod would have honored our union to preserve the integrity of laws from which they derive all their power, allowing them a baseline from which to make demands in exchange for concessions.

I negotiated my way out of your arms.  For parents with more rationalizations than compassion, I chose an institution’s arms over yours.  I chose the cold hell of absence.  Nothing stings like replacing what was physical with nothing at all.  Had you made concessions to contact me virtually, I never would have learned how much I love your face distinctly from all others, your arms from all other arms, and your words over all other words.  I know the love of loss.

Who knows what we might have become?

Instead you are a wanted man on the run, surviving either by your wits or some design of the Mod’s.  I am a young woman who, while no longer young in her thinking, has failed to internalize the rationale as they planned.  How can I eat when I don’t know how you gather food?  How can I allow myself to feel the warmth of radiant when I don’t know how you stay warm as fall nights return?

Here they set the radiant assuming we wear pajamas and one sheet.  They cannot know I refuse the cover of either, shivering at the thought of how you must live.  Some nights I rub my arms to stay warm or climb down from the bed and walk in place to keep my blood moving.  I’ve grown thin remembering what it was like when you’d walk me home.  When I’m not worrying about conserving paper, I memorialize in ink the experience of walking home from one of our “meets.”  Meets.  Why did they encourage such blandness of language in our writing courses when digital storage was never in short supply?

They can take their rationale and stick it where the sun shines.  They can stick the rationale outdoors and let the sun penetrate its core.  If they want me to accept the rationale, then that’s where they’ll find me.  They’ll find me out.

Wherever you are, Marco, I have found you.  Despite her intentions, my mother gave me one useful morsel of advice.  After chatting that you’d been flying your sign on a kite, she told me to look up to my future.  Where else would I look?

They can tint all the windows in City from the inside; they can tell the citizens it is for their own protection from the hazard.  They can apply whatever inconsistent coating they want.  When I look into the darkness of my room’s window after the glow of tech has dimmed, when I touch that cold pane of glass, knowing you are on the other side of night, it is then I see you flying your kite against the patrol’s headlights, floodlights and whatever other lights they use to break the night.

Whatever the next invention, night will not end.  Whatever their efforts, darkness will return. Night, in its blankness, offers a canvas for living.  In that light, I will come to you.

Say the word, Marco, and for you I will go.  For you, I will go transit. 

Transit with you into the night.