Chapter 3
Episode 3ne poli acrivo o micri murgis
The sketchbook lay open on my lap, its spine cracked from years of neglect. The pages were brittle, the edges yellowed like the leaves I had crushed underfoot in the park. I traced a finger over a drawing I barely remembered making—a girl in a dress with too many pleats, standing alone in a field of tall grass. Her face was a smudge of charcoal, but I knew her. She was me, at ten, before I learned to fold myself into smaller versions of myself.
Outside the window, the afternoon light slanted low and golden, catching dust motes that drifted like tiny worlds. I had not touched this book since the summer I turned fourteen, the summer my grandmother died. She had given me the sketchbook, along with a bundle of fabric scraps from her sewing basket—silks and cottons and one piece of deep velvet the color of bruised plums. “For your stories,” she had said, her hands knotted with age but still quick. “You will sew them into something real.”
I had never sewn a thing. But I had drawn. And now, sitting in the quiet of my small apartment, I felt the weight of those unfinished stories pressing against my ribs.
The laughter I had heard in the park—that sharp, mocking sound—still echoed. It belonged to a boy named Lukas, who had once pulled the ribbon from my hair and thrown it into a puddle. And to his friend Rasa, who had whispered “ugly” so softly that only I could hear. They were children then, but their voices had followed me into adulthood, shaping the way I walked through rooms, the way I held my shoulders, the way I said yes when I meant no.
I turned the page. Another drawing: a bird with a broken wing, perched on a windowsill. Below it, in my childish hand, the words: “It will fly again.”
I closed the sketchbook and stood. The afternoon was fading, and the air smelled of rain and wet earth. I pulled on my coat and walked out, not toward the park this time, but toward the old fabric shop on Vytauto Street, the one with the faded sign and the bell that chimed like a spoon against glass. I did not know what I was looking for. But my grandmother had believed in the weight of cloth, in the stories that fabric could hold. Perhaps, if I touched the right piece, I would remember how to let the rest go.