Tabil Raidan [District Eight; resubmission]

Tabil Raidan -- thirty-eight -- male -- District Eight

You never expected to be happy. Growing up you stayed lighthearted because—what with Naam and Yaron always at each other's throats, a quaver in Shrol's songs and a fight in the set of Dor's shoulders, Natan forever looking a half-step from crying and Rivik more often than not helpless to cheer him up—someone had to. Someone had to be the calm one, the soft one, the one who could redirect fights and soothe the air. But you were a child trying to paste together a home in ways that should never have been your responsibility, and you were hungry and cold more often than you were safe, with little more than hand-me-down faith to reassure you that life wouldn't always be this way. Of course you were scared, hurting, exhausted to your blood; of course you never imagined a future where you could say a single word without worrying how every person around you might hear it.

Then again, you never imagined a future without all your siblings, either.

It took you a long time to stop feeling guilty for building a life in a future Shrol and Yaron never reached. Even now you have trouble telling, when you look back, how much of that actually came from you and how much came from the way your parents tried to teach you to feel bad for everything—as though wanting to be treated well or holding the wrong hand or being alive were the kinds of sins a person spends their existence atoning for. (Your mother still manages to make you feel like that when you see her, somehow, which is why you don't as often as you should, especially on your own. As often as you feel like you should—you think Kusumo wishes you visited less, if anything, but he never tries to talk you out of it, only asks whether you want company and makes sure you'll have something to keep you busy when you get home. You don't know what you did to deserve him.) It's easier now, though, with time and perspective. Dor of all people griped at you once that if you wouldn't begrudge the rest of your siblings a chance at happiness, it couldn't be fair to treat yourself any differently, and you've done your best to take that to heart.

Visiting their graves helps, too, and you make sure to go every other month or so. Worn-soft Bible tucked into the back of your bedside table notwithstanding, you're no longer sure what you believe has happened to them, but you can't imagine either of them silenced eternally, so you tell them the news as you brush leaves from their engravings and trim the flowers. They heard about you moving out with the twins, and the twins moving out on their own. Once you pictured the look on Yaron's face at imagining Naam in a classroom and startle yourself laughing out loud, and sometimes you hum a few bars of Natan's latest songs for Shrol, though you always let him share the finished products himself. You introduced them to Kusumo the year after you meet him and visited the day before your wedding in your outfits, and you brought Galih and Rizki the spring after they were born, laughing when Galih tried to gnaw on a corner of Shrol's grave marker and Kusumo swooped down to grab her; and another year after that, Kusumo reintroduced himself, his name still new on his tongue and the tiniest bit hesitant but his eyes glowing, while you beamed beside him and the kids practiced their teetering steps in the lawn. And if there's nothing big, you tell them the little things—the dish you learned to make last week, a lamb birthed overnight, anything you can think of that might have made them smile when they were alive.

And you try not to dwell on the hard parts, but you talk about those, too, at least enough to be honest. These things, too, are your life. Even when it was fresh you avoided mentioning the guilt—that isn't their burden to shoulder—but they've heard about the times Dor storms out of a family lunch and the rest of you don't hear from him for weeks or months, and how scared you were for the long months when pregnancy proved harder than Kusumo expected and he couldn't bring himself to get out of bed, and the accidents at the textile mill that gave you nightmares before you quit to return to the fields you had been so relieved to escape. (The fields you still work in, and try not to grumble about too much, because at least you're in better straits than you grew up in—but hell, it would be nice for your joints not to ache for just one week.)

They didn't hear about the first time you met Kusumo's parents, less because you didn't want them to hear it and more because you couldn't figure out how to talk about it. You barely knew how to talk about it to Kusumo when he found you overwhelmed and crying in the bathroom after dinner, not because his parents had been cruel to you but because they had been too ready to welcome you, an explanation that sent a series of expressions you'd see again flickering over his face before he knelt on the tile and wrapped his arms around you silently. You don't think about that evening often when you talk to Ayu and Suryo anymore, but you're nearly as grateful to them for folding you into their family as you are to Kusumo for every moment you've been lucky enough to share with him. Logically you know you would have done something else with your life if you'd never met them, but you owe them all more than you know how to tell them—for showing you how parents can be, for reminding you that faith can be something that supports you instead of tearing you apart, for the piles of small daily joys you try to return to them in kind.

And those are the types of things that make the difference, aren't they? Life could be easier, calmer, more stable, but you love a husband who loves you back, and you handle the hard parts together. The family you were born with hasn't worked everything out yet, but those of you who are left are getting there, together and apart and safely out from your father's shadow. Eight now, Rizki and Galih make sure your home is never too quiet, and whatever else happens on any given day, you know that they and Kusumo will be in it and you'll get to be there for them.

You wish you'd grown up in a world that was kinder—to Shrol and Yaron, to the rest of your siblings, to everyone. There will always be things that hurt and things you wish you had the power to change. But you can't look at the life you've found yourself in without remembering how happy you are to be living it.