The Dig.

Yulia and Yure sat back on their heels, breathless and wild. Steam from their exertion, punctuated the purple quiet of evenfall in Luhansk. They giggled, out of nervousness really, unequipped to respond in any other way.

Less than a day ago they had been solitary travelers, separated by time and tectonics, two celestial bodies at apogee. Now, here they were, at the base of an ancient black poplar, in a freshly hewn hayfield so steeped in their past, the air sagged under the weight of what used to be. Their long orbits, separated by cataclysm, were being drawn back by the gravity of an old promise.

With sleeves rolled to the elbow, and trembling hands caked in mud and memory, they stared into what should have been the past. On a small berm of hand raked dirt, perched the rusting “Alf” lunchbox they had buried thirty years ago to the very day. What was supposed to be an exhilarating, archeological quest to exhume the trinkets of a long ago love, had turned into something else entirely.

Yulia and Yure, expecting some time-crumbled epistles, a bottle cap commemorating their first kiss, and a Michael Jackson mix tape, stared slack-jawed at what lay before them. $20,000 in cold, hard, American cash.

Yulia might have heard shouting from the platform behind her and vaguely felt the motion of rushing bodies in her periphery, but she couldn’t be sure. Her brain was redlining, crunching data, supercomputing vast future models trying to process his presence in such an unexpected context… like opening up a refrigerator and finding a changeling boy. Something so profoundly out of place that it freezes you to the pavement.  He wasn’t supposed to be here. Not after so long. Not after…

She was jolted from her trance by a large, woolen elbow jostling past her with rather abrupt purpose, spilling hot coffee on her thankfully gloved hand. Yulia could no longer understand what the man attached to the elbow was yelling, but the unmistakable tone of danger was enough to pull her eyes from a face she hadn’t seen in three decades and back toward the source of all the bedlam. There was smoke billowing out of the train car - her train car.

Passengers were quickly being ushered out as uniformed men herded them into groups at the far end of the platform, trying their best to keep the pot from boiling over into a panic. Yulia clocked her carriage mate Alexandr emerging wide-eyed from thick black smoke.  She saw the crooked-spined old man from the compartment two down from hers, and the retropunk princess in platform Rude Boy brogues that was chain smoking Gauloises three stops back.

Other men in other uniforms were rushing past her on both sides now, carrying extinguishers that hadn’t seen action since the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Yulia was bumped again, this time with enough force to turn her shoulders back towards her past.  She searched frantically for his face in the vortex of smoke and coats swirling around her but he wasn’t in his window. Had she seen him at all?

Yulia heard the unmistakable hiss of air brakes being released and saw the slow rolling lurch of the dream train loping out the station like a drunk staggering home from closing time. She began to walk alongside the departing train, gaining speed as it did, knifing her way through the commotion as she searched every window. She was nearing the end of the platform at practically a dead run, jumping to see above the furry hats, splitting bodies like an axe into firewood when she spotted him again.

He was up and moving too, walking backward through each car, stooping to spy her from every window he passed. As the second to last car pulled out of the station, they arrived at the terminus of their journeys in equal time- he, standing palms against the fogging glass of the rear most window and she, halted at the end of the platform by a stanchion and a large red остановка. Their searches met, finally understanding that what the other was seeing was no mirage, no trick of the eyes, or lingering case of mistaken identity, he was real and so was she, and this would be the second time she watched him pull away. In a quick flurry of hands and coat pockets he produced a pen and small, black notebook. Frantically scribbling something against the glass, he tore out a sheet. He folded it once, twice, three times and then licked a wing like an envelope headed to the front lines. He pinched the hinges on the window sash folding it down, and as the last car cleared the signal house and headed out into the black and white of night and snow he sent his hasty missive soaring. The crudely folded plane bobbed in the wake of the train and rolled aloft in the crosswinds of the outdoor station. As his once boyish face disappeared into the frigid Ukrainian night, a paper airplane hopped once on the polished concrete and slid to rest at her feet. She knelt, paused, and picked it up with a crooked smile, the same way she had the day they first met.  

“You came. I knew you would. Meet me there.”

“Do you promise?” Yure whispered, his eyes cast down into the freshly dug hole.

“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eye,” Yulia assured in her native Russian. She pressed her lips against the American One Dollar Bill, leaving the smudged remnants of a girl unsure about wearing her mother’s lipstick. “I have to go Yure. Our train leaves for Minsk in the morning”

Yure ran his fingers over the imprint, pressed his own lips to the note and dropped it into the lunchbox. Together, they pushed the cold dirt back into the whole they’d created, topping off their promise of the future and patting down their past with a spade stolen from Yure’s uncle. 
 “Thirty years. No matter if were old and gray, or married…”

Yulia giggled at an inconceivable thought…

“No matter what ,we meet here and finish what we started. Promise?”

“I promise, Yure. I have to go.”

“Kiss me.”

“… Yure”

“Please. Kiss me Yulia. I won’t… please”

Yulia presses her lips to his and the stars burn. Cataclysm. Cosmos collide. The long orbit begins. Their knees are wet and their eyes are wet, and Yulia stands to run down the hill, back home through the hayfield.

“Write me!” she sings, and disappears into the gathering mist.