{ }

The first memory Han has of herself is waking up in her childhood home, her mother leaning over her. She holds a wooden spoon in front of Han’s face, a dark, viscous medicine dripping from it.

“Do I really have to?”, her childhood self asks, knowing the smoky-alcoholic taste all too well. “I’m too young to drink.” Han was barely old enough to go to primary school.

As always, the comment makes her mom smile. “You really have to”, she answers, “and if you always stick to not more than a spoon, you'll be fine. It will help, you’ll see. Tomorrow you’ll be full of beans again.”

She swallows the medicine and her mother, content, walks over to the window to open the curtain. Sunlight floods into the room, making Han blink.

“Just don’t close your eyes”, her mother adds. “Always keep them open.”

“Why?”, Han replies, surprised.

“So that you always see what is there”, her mom answers, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Just to add, moments later, in a voice that is barely more than a whisper, “and not what isn’t.”

_

What was there, at this morning and any other morning that followed, was the vast outskirts of Mora, plains of impoverished, colorful, sparkling huts and shacks, erupting from the hill her house stood on, and flowing until the coastline in a few miles distance. Now and then, the waves would sweep away the most reckless of the huts, those closest to the ocean and it would never take long until someone else, as reckless or maybe desperate would rebuild them. People said the only way to leave Mora was through the ocean, and myths spun around generous water gods, taking chosen people to their underwater kingdom, where they would form an army, preparing for some final war. Other than that, Mora wasn’t a place one usually would leave. Coming, sure, many people were flowing into the city every day, but leaving?

While Han grew into a young woman, sharing the same hut with her mother and two brothers that her family had always lived in, she grew accustomed to the prospect of living and one day dying in Mora, as anyone else she knew or ever heard of did. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. She wasn’t alone, she was with her family, there was the old lady who every morning walked around the streets, praising her fresh fish that everyone knew was from the day before, and Pastor Charles who visited them regularly and did his best to put meaning to all of this. Most importantly, all this was embedded in some comforting feeling of solidarity, an in-this-together spirit. A way of making this very particular mess that Mora certainly was theirs and therefore beautiful.

It was not until she met Denver that she ever thought about leaving.

Denver was a year younger, like Han, grew up in Mora. But unlike her, he wasn’t born there. His father had lived one of these lives one would now only see on TV and which seemed like from another country, another planet even. And he, who never fully accepted his fate of having to live in Mora, kept telling his son stories from the other side, nurturing the dream in this young boy's head, to one day see all of this again.

A dream, that turned into a plan.

A plan, that not long after he first met Han at a rationing station, they started to share.

An impossible plan, that he made look more and more possible with every passing day.

_“Look”, he said when he saw her weaving clothes for her brothers. “You’re actually good at this. They need people like you, they don’t do these things themselves anymore. It will help us to earn a living.”

_“It’s not that it’s difficult, father says. It’s just that people never try. How can we actually know it’s difficult when we never try?”

_“Dad still knows people. He said we even have family there!”

_"He says if he wouldn't have lost his job, and one can't really blame them for that, he could have stayed. They didn't want him to leave."

And with every moment they spent together, each reassurance, each figuring out details of their plan, the option of escaping Mora became more real. And against the background of this dream, Mora lost its colors and became a pale copy of what it once was.

_Suddenly, she started smelling the odors hovering over Mora like a heavy, lazy cloud.

_The noises became noise and the mere thought of walking through the streets of Mora, something she remembered enjoying as a child, gave her a headache.

_The indifference with which people lived, with which she lived, started to unsettle her.

_Did those people never ask themselves if there was more? More than running around the streets, praising the fish from yesterday, or seeing a god in places where there obviously wasn’t?

The thought of staying in Mora, which hadn't even been a thought before, became unbearable. And so, she could hardly keep her calm when the day finally came. A day that would change everything.

They made the plan just a few days earlier when they were sufficiently confident that the winter was gone, and the passage over the mountains possible. They would meet right after sunset, at the foot of the hill. The very place they met for the first time. He would bring something to eat for the passage, which he promised wouldn’t take longer than a few days. She would bring warm clothes.

She made sure no one saw her when she left the house, her mom was cooking dinner, and her brothers were out working and wouldn't return before midnight. When she closed the door behind her, she was relieved to see the streets empty. Not that she would do anything forbidden, not that Mora had any laws or rules at all, but it wasn’t safe either. When she arrived at the agreed meeting point, she leaned against the cooling wall of a mud house but couldn’t stand still for more than a few seconds. Instead, she wandered around in circles, impatient, longing.

After a few minutes, she started feeling nervous too. Maybe he did forget the provisions he promised? Maybe someone had stopped him? Not that he had ever been late to anything, but sure there was a reason. And even when the waiting felt like an hour, it probably wasn’t much more than a few minutes. So she kept waiting.

When she finally heard cautious footsteps approaching from behind, she almost wanted to jump. But the closer the silhouette came, the less it looked like Denver.

“Where is Denver?”, she asked the silhouette that turned out to be his brother.

“He caught something”, his brother replied, himself close to tears. “He might not make it. He told me where to find you. He told me he’s sorry too.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I won’t tell anyone I found you here”, he tried to reassure her. “Just go home, and you will be safe. It will be as if nothing had happened.” He waited a few moments, observing her, then turned back and left her behind, shaking. She felt a tight grip around something inside her. A hand wringing out her soul like a soaked towel, a dream leaving her drop by drop.

She would never leave this place.

The realization hit her with a physical force, unlike anything she had ever experienced. She wouldn’t wake up in the mountains, next to a river, next to Denver, a new life ahead, but in her bed up on the hill. Like all the other days. She would hear the old lady praising her fish tomorrow. She might even become that old lady one day.

She sank back to the ground, both unable to leave and to return home, just now. She closed her eyes. Couldn’t they just have left earlier? Or later, to keep that dream alive at least a little longer?

She knew those were impossible thoughts, just as her dream of living another life had maybe always been impossible. Slowly, the realization sunk in.

_The temporary became permanent

_The escape an illusion

_And the moment that everything changed, nothing happened.

You were right, Mom, she thought to herself, opening her eyes to the view of shimmering stars behind a veil of mist.

It’s better to keep them open.