I take a deep breath and hold it there. “Daniel wanted kids. He wanted me to stay home. No woman in his family had worked a day in their life, so he expected the same from me.”
The memory presses against my chest.
“At some point while we were in that car, I thought…” My voice shakes. “God, wouldn’t it be great if he was gone. If he would just stop talking for one second and let me finish one sentence.”
The tears come on their own, sliding down my cheeks. My hands fly to my face, wiping at them quickly as the words tumble out.
“Is this my punishment?” My voice cracks. “Maybe I deserve it.”
Somewhere between my broken words, Dasha loses hers. She sets the notebook down near my feet and wraps her arms around me, pulling me close.
And once again I fall apart in her arms. Her hand taps softly against my shoulder before she slowly pulls away, then she reaches for the notebook and places it gently on my lap.
“When I first came here, back in 1974,” she says, “I was completely alone.”
She smiles faintly.
“I heard that American girls love to write diaries.”
Her eyes soften at the memory. “I asked why. One of them told me it was easier to put words on paper than to say them out loud. That way, when you are ready to talk to someone, you already understand your own thoughts.”
She taps the cover of the notebook and looks at me.
“In Russia we like to pretend we don’t have feelings. We keep quiet about them. I understood why they wrote them.”
She lifts the notebook slightly.
“Here,1malyshka.You can start by writing good memories. When you feel sad, you can look at them and remember that life was not always heavy and sad.”
“Thank you,” I sniff, taking the notebook and opening the first page.
“I have to go back to the Academy,” Dasha says as she stands, steadying herself against the edge of the bed.
She grabs her purse, adjusts the strap on her shoulder, and digs through it. A moment later she pulls out a pen and holds it out to me.
“I assume you won’t be writing with your finger.”
She winks as I take it from her hand.
She walks toward the door, and before reaching the frame, she turns back.
“I will come back in the afternoon.”
I nod.
She disappears down the hallway while I stare at the empty page resting on my lap, the pen still in my hand.
I guess this is supposed to be the beginning of a new chapter, but it already feels tragic.
Looking down at the page, I remember when my mom gave me a diary for my eighth birthday. My father burned it in the fireplace two days later. I watched it burn. Every page I had written had gone up in flames. All he said was that one day I would thank him, because no one would ever find out my secrets.
´The less people know about you, the less they can hold against you.´That was something he always said. So, my mom bought me another one. She told me words were meant to be told. If I couldn’t keep a diary, I could write stories instead. That I could change my name and make people in my life into different characters. And that’s what I did. Soon the stories grew longer, turned into something bigger. But not even one had an ending.
A tear from my cheek slips onto the paper. When I lower the pen to write, the ink touches the tear and spreads slowly across the page. But no words come.
“Memories,” I whisper.
I should write about memories. I place the pen on the paper and begin to write.
