This piece contains spoilers for Far Changing Tides.
What would you cling to in a world where you have nothing? The future, perhaps? The hope that one day, someday, this too would pass? What would it take for you to keep putting one foot in front of the other when nothing in this frigid place can rustle up enough enthusiasm to care if you live or die?
It turned out to be a carousel that I clung to. A carousel, then a duck, then a crudely carved deer, and finally a tiny ballerina in a box, the figure forever frozen in a pirouette. I hung them on the hooks placed strategically throughout my caravan-cum-ship-cum-best-friend, but always on the ones farthest away from the furnace, as though storing them far away meant I’d never have to burn them. It’s not that I didn’t care about the things I did sacrifice to the hungry engine. It was impossible to gather the discarded luggage and not wonder about who packed them and where they were now. But the deer and the duck and the ballerina symbolised something else, I think. By storing them separately from the rest of the junk I picked up along the way, I was making a choice. I was choosing to keep them safe for the future. Because there was a future – and I was choosing to survive.
