Letters to the Front [Uxue]

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