Chapter 2
Episode 2why iš that like first art to be the Russia language instread of knowing just what to ask why ... Iš that Me foreigh language į am linely . Cant bet that filosofų why . Ir į need to dupport homė . To starto sewing and į font gavę 15even a reason why. Russian gramar instread of Facultative stich
The needle pauses mid-air, and I hold my breath as if the vacuum outside might rush in to fill the silence. The dress is finished—has been finished for three lunar cycles now—but I cannot stop sewing. I tear out the stitches and begin again, each time a different rhythm, a different alphabet. Why Russian? The question loops like a broken ventilation fan, spinning without end.
I am older now. Fifteen. Fifteen and still counting stitches in a tongue that tastes foreign on my tongue. I practice the words in the mirror of my sleeping alcove, lips forming sounds that feel like stones in my mouth. "Я люблю." I love. But whom? The moon? The thread? The girl who stares back at me with eyes the color of regolith? I do not know. The grammar of affection escapes me.
Home needs support. My mother's hands are raw from filtering water recyclers; my father's back bends over hydroponic trays until he moves like a question mark. I could sew for credits—repair suits, patch the colony's worn-out banners. But instead I sew letters. Facultative stich, I call it. An elective embroidery of the soul. No one pays for that.
Yet I cannot stop. The needle is my compass, the thread my map. I am mapping a territory inside myself that has no coordinates. The dress hangs on the wall now, a grid of Cyrillic and colored dyes. Some letters I recognize: х (kha) like the sound of clearing a throat, ч (che) like the click of a latch. Others are just shapes, beautiful and meaningless. I tell myself this is art, not grammar. But art does not feed the colony.
Tonight I pick up a new piece of fabric—olive drab from a decommissioned uniform. I will sew a bag, a practical thing for carrying mineral samples. But my fingers disobey. They begin with a letter: П. Then Е. Then Р. "Перо." Feather? Pen? I was supposed to learn Russian properly—the colony offered a course once, but I skipped it to watch the Earth rise. Now I know only fragments, the way a broken mineral knows only its own fracture lines.
The loneliness is a stitch that never closes. I thread the needle again, and the rhythm returns—in, out, pull, loop. In, out, pull, loop. It is the only prayer I have. For whom? For what? Maybe for the girl who was eleven and thought she could sew her way out of silence. She couldn't. But she learned that some questions have no answers, only more stitches.
I look at the half-formed word on the olive fabric: "Перо." A feather. A pen. Something light, something that writes. I do not know if I am the feather or the pen, but I know I am still sewing. And that, for now, is reason enough to keep going.