Hiraeth

Was it possible to grieve for someone you never knew?

Farren didn’t know what it was like to grieve, it so rarely happened now, but here in her hands was someone’s whole life. A worn, cracked book and a heart shaped locket. Two plain objects that hummed with life so powerful that she could practically see the words on the page melting into images, far more detailed than the holograms that hovered behind her.

His words were beautiful. They bled with the joy and fear of a person who knew they would die, who knew their days were numbered and yet, they laughed at their own fragile mortality.

Mortality.

What a strange word that was. A time when men and women alike feared they would not wake up the next morning. It was a word from the age of man who ran through fields of mud and grass, who raced birds through trees and build castles out of sand.

Farren could see the images the boy wrote about, how he allowed his very soul to bleed onto the pages under her fingers with the reckless abandonment that she knew that no one of her time would ever have.

The boy in the book made her laugh, cry and wince in second-hand embarrassment. He didn’t hold back his words, writing so vividly that Farren often heard his voice in her ears, whispering the words on the page to her. In her imagination he had a fairly deep voice, that rolled like the waves on the shore that she had seen in images on the database.

Her fingers slipped over the heart-shaped locket, the silver was rusted in places, but the ruby in its centre was whole, it caught the light from her room with a playful gleam. She wondered if the boy’s eyes had gleamed in the same way as his locket.

A strange feeling gathered in her chest, a sense of loss and sadness. The boy in the book described the trees and rivers, he took great joy in gentle summer breezes, painting Farren a vivid picture of long grass swaying in fields, the quite joy of butterflies landing on his nose and the taste of honey on his lips. He described the sea, the rolling waves that seemed to him like a young dog chasing its tail, constantly trying to reach the top of the beach but falling back halfway up the sand.

The trees and waves were foreign concepts to Farren. She was not allowed outside the city walls, she had never seen a real forest, had never smelt the forest after a heavy storm as the boy describe, she had never felt the playful lick of the ocean on her bare feet.

Immortality, or near immortality as she was granted by technology had its limits; they could not travel beyond the walls, not with the radiation levels. Few were allowed to cross the land between major cities. If she had been born by the ocean perhaps, she could have travelled to other coastal cities.

Farren had never question her life before. They were taught from birth about the gift that technology had granted them; but this book, this locket, gave her a view of a life that despite being far shorter than hers was far more appealing.

It seemed to Farren that death was what made life exciting. Perhaps they had lost that over the decades. When you have everything at your fingers, do you really have anything that actually means something? Farren had everything she could ever ask for, apart from her own freedom.

This boy was her adventure, he painted her a world which her she longed to travel to. Her fingers trembled as she turned the pages, a word coming into her mind that she had found years ago in the database that everything was connected to.

Hiraeth.

An untranslatable deep nostalgia for a place or time that will never be again.

The way he described the laughter of his friends or the pattern of birds in the sky made her giggle under the covers late at night, her light spilling onto the pages just a s eagerly as she read the words before her.

But he took the most time describing his little sister. The one who had given him the locket that Farren no held. A sibling was another foreign concept to Farren. Parents were allowed a single child. Population control the government had called it. The necessary sacrifice for near immortality.

Until she had found this book Farren had thought that was the only sacrifice she had to make, but now as the pages threatened to crumble beneath her fingers, she realised that she was trapped in a system that gave her nothing but empty words on velvet tongues.

Quiet tears slipped down her face leaving itching scars in their wake as she reached the next page. Her grip on the locket was so hard that a heart shaped imprint was burned into her palm. The colour of the boy’s words faded, as did his voice. The writing became short and shaky as if his hand had been shaking so much, he could barely write the words. Several lines were smudged now. Tears. Farren realised. Tears that had fallen hundreds of years ago and yet here they were, spattered onto the page in her hands like petals.

Cancer.

The word was familiar to Farren. An old disease of the past. She didn’t know the little girl who was dying all those years ago, but she felt like she did. The way the boy...her boy wrote made her heart feel unusually heavy. Her own tears splashed down joining his; hundreds of years separated them and yet Farren wanted to reach through the pages to hold him as tightly as his words held her.

She struggled through his shaky handwriting as he talked about the way he had held his sisters’ hand for the last time. Gone was the joy and light in his words. To her surprise he didn’t describe his surroundings in her last moments, he didn’t talk about his memories of his sister. Instead, he focused on the small details. He described her eyes.

A hazel green, the colour of moss according to him. A green that Farren knew from the boy’s previous accounts had been like moss catching the sunlight at sunrise in spring. But his sisters’ eyes were now was damp and dark. He described the hazel green as the wet moss on dead logs in winter, hanging onto to life as the chilling wind and snow battered them.

Was it possible to grieve for someone you never knew?

Farren thought it was. She grieved for the girl. She grieved for the boy whose hands shook so much that the next page stopped abruptly ad if he couldn’t bring himself to write anything else. The locket felt very heavy in her hands. This very locket had been hanging around the girl’s neck above her once beating heart.

The next pages were blank aside from rough sketches of the heart shaped locket, Farren saw now what the ruby represented to the boy. The ruby and metal heart were now as cold and still as its previous owner. Mortality.

When the words returned Farren noticed that the handwriting had changed as had the boy’s voice. The colours and feelings in the words were louder more overwhelming. Gone was the peaceful melody of the song he had whispered in her ears, instead now was a loud cacophony of colours, sounds and images that raced through page after page as if he couldn’t stop the cascade of words pouring from his mind.

It was only now that she realised that she felt so intertwined in the boy’s story that no matter how much he threw at her through his words she would take it. Because she felt like she knew him, she knew him as well as she knew her own parents.

Perhaps it wasn’t grief she felt for the boy. Not as she began to reach the end of the book. Grief was too terrible a word to encompass what she felt for him. She wished she could go back to the start when the boy had his childlike joy emanating through the pages.

How beautiful and terrible it was to see the world through a child’s eyes, where everything is simple. Where feelings are as simple as happy and sad.

Farren reached the final 5 pages; the final entry of the diary. And for the first time the boy addressed her. He spoke to her directly through the pages. His voice was so clear to her now that Farren could practically see him sitting opposite her, crossed legged on the floor of her small room. In her mind he had jet black hair and the same hazel eyes he had described his sister had. In Farren’s imagination he had dirt on his cheeks and hands, fallen petals in his hair, looking like stars in his dark hair. He was wearing the locket around his neck, the ruby heart resting at the base of his throat. He had dimples when he smiled. But his smile was empty now and his voice was hoarse in her ears.

She closed the book. The final sentence was unfinished; the diary was unfinished.

She closed her eyes against the tears that threatened to spill over the feeble barrier her lashes created. He had been in her mind for so long that it didn’t feel right for his story to end so abruptly.

It wasn’t fair. He couldn’t just paint her a world of light and laughter, he couldn’t take her on a path through grief and anger only to leave her alone in the dark. He couldn’t leave her heart fluttering in her chest as he spoke to her through the pages.

But he could.

That is what they were. A boy and a girl separated by hundreds of years. Communicating through an old book and a heart shaped locket with a story. A locket that held not one life but two.

And now claimed a third as Farren carefully clasped the rusted locket around her own neck. She would get looks tomorrow; the rusted metal bound to cause her parents to raise an eyebrow in disappointment.

She had been foolish to get attached to a boy who lived a hundred years before her. Who would never know who she was, but she didn’t regret it. She knew his story. It had taught her far more than near immortality ever had.

This was her locket now and she wouldn’t take it off. No matter how imperfect it was judge by society. Just as mortality was imperfect.

Both mortality and this locket were the most beautiful things to Farren because of their imperfections. Because they had a history, and they were fragile.

Was it possible to fall in love with someone you never knew?

Someone you couldn’t save.

Someone who didn’t want to be saved.