Wanda writes a letter to the girl she lost in Sokovia. The girl who argued about batteries, kissed her first, and called their apartment home. The girl the world took before Wanda became the thing the world is afraid of.
written February 22nd-April, 12th 2024
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Wanda POV
I have been trying to find the right place to begin.
That's funny, isn't it? You would think it would be obvious, the beginning. The first moment. The first time I saw you. But grief doesn't work that way. Grief puts everything in a blender and hands you the glass and says drink. So I've been sitting here, wherever here is, whatever this dark is, trying to untangle the thread of you from everything else, and I keep finding that I can't. You're woven into all of it. You're woven into me.
So I'll start with the sand.
Do you remember the river? The one outside the city, past the factory district, where the bank was more mud than sand but we called it a beach anyway because neither of us had ever seen a real one. You drew something in the sand there once. I don't remember what it was, a house, maybe, or a flower, or a word in a language you were teaching yourself from a stolen textbook. You were always teaching yourself something. You drew it with a stick and the river took it within the hour, and you didn't seem upset about that at all. I asked you why, and you looked at me like I'd asked something very stupid and very important at the same time.
"Because I know what it looked like," you said. "The river doesn't get to take that part."
I have been holding onto that sentence for longer than you have been dead.
I need to tell you how we met, because I need to say it out loud, because I'm afraid that if I don't, the details will start to soften and blur the way details do when you hold them too long. And I won't allow that. I won't let time do to you what it does to everything else.
It was October. Sokovia in October was the color of bruises, purple sky, grey buildings, yellow where the streetlights caught the wet pavement. Pietro and I were seventeen. We were living in the apartment on that street, the one above the man who played accordion badly at three in the morning and cried when anyone asked him to stop. We had electricity that week. I remember that because I was reading by an actual lamp instead of a candle, and I felt like a queen.
You were in the market. That open air one near the old church, where the women sold cabbage and stockings and occasionally something that had fallen off a military truck. I was buying bread. You were arguing with a vendor about the price of batteries. You were losing the argument, but you were losing it so loudly and with such specific, furious hand gestures that a small crowd had gathered, and half of them were on your side purely out of admiration for your commitment.
You had a coat that was too big for you. Green. Military surplus, probably. The sleeves were rolled up three times at the cuffs, and your hands still barely cleared them. Your hair was a disaster. You had a bruise on your jaw that I would later learn came from a doorframe, because you walked into things when you were thinking too hard, which was always.
I didn't know, standing there holding my bread, that I was looking at the most important thing that would ever happen to me.
I just thought: she's loud.
And then you turned, because the vendor had finally thrown you out of his stall with a string of curses that were creative even by Sokovian standards, and you caught me looking, and you didn't smile. You just studied me, the way you studied everything, like I was a sentence in a language you were teaching yourself. And then you said, to me, a total stranger, in the middle of a crowded market with cabbage in my peripheral vision:
"He's charging triple for batteries that don't even last a week. This is a systemic issue."
And I said, "Okay."
And you said, "I'm serious."
And I said, "I can see that."
And that was it. That was the whole beginning. No thunder. No sign from the universe. Just a girl in a coat that didn't fit, telling me about batteries, and some part of me shifting sideways to make room for her without knowing that's what I was doing.
Pietro liked you. I want you to know that, I want you to hear that, because I know it mattered to you, even though you pretended it didn't. He called you battery girl after that first story, and you called him an idiot, and by the end of the first week, you had a standing invitation to our apartment and opinions about our furniture. You told Pietro his mattress was a health hazard. He told you your coat made you look like a defecting soldier. You threw a potato at him. He caught it. You both laughed, and I stood in the doorway of that terrible kitchen and felt something crack open inside my chest that I didn't have a name for yet.
I have a name for it now. I have too many names for it now.
You kissed me first.
I need to tell you that because I think you might have remembered it differently. I think you might have remembered it as mutual, as simultaneous, as something that happened to both of us at the same time. And maybe it was. Maybe by then we were so tangled up in each other that it didn't matter who leaned in first. But I remember. I remember it was you.
It was December. The apartment was freezing. Pietro was out, working, or pretending to work, or doing whatever Pietro did when he disappeared for hours and came back smelling like cigarettes and someone else's cologne. You were sitting on the floor because the couch was broken in the specific way that meant it was fine for sleeping but hostile to sitting, and you were reading, and I was pretending to read, and the lamp was making your face half gold and half shadow, and I was thinking about your hands.
I was always thinking about your hands. They were never still. You talked with them, read with them, argued with them. When you were concentrating, you pressed your thumb into the center of your opposite palm, over and over, like you were trying to anchor yourself to something. I wanted to be the thing you anchored yourself to. I didn't know how to say that. I was seventeen and stupid and terrified of the size of what I felt for you, because nothing that big had ever fit inside me before, and I didn't trust myself not to break it.
You looked up from your book and caught me again. You were always catching me. And instead of saying something clever, instead of making a joke the way you usually did when the air between us got too heavy, you just, put the book down. And you looked at me with this expression that I have spent every day since trying to describe and failing. It wasn't soft. It wasn't tender. It was serious. Like you had done the math on what this would cost and you were willing to pay it.
You crossed the room on your knees because standing up felt like too far, I think. And you put your hands, your impossible, restless, beautiful hands, on either side of my face. And you kissed me. And the whole world went simple.
I don't mean it got easy. Nothing in Sokovia was easy. I mean it got simple. Like the equation reduced. Like everything I had been carrying, the grief and the anger and the fear and the hunger and the cold, suddenly had a counterweight, and the counterweight was your mouth, and your fingers in my hair, and the small sound you made against my lips that I will hear until the day I stop existing.
We didn't say I love you that night. We said it later, in a much less romantic context, I think you were sick, actually, some awful flu, and you were furious about it because being sick was an inefficiency your schedule couldn't absorb, and I brought you soup that was mostly water and you looked up at me from your pile of blankets with your red nose and your fever bright eyes and said, "I love you, and I'm going to die, and you need to put more salt in this."
And I said, "You're not going to die."
I was so sure. I was so unbelievably sure.
I want to tell you about the good months, because they deserve to be spoken out loud. They deserve air.
There were seven of them. Seven months between that first kiss and the day the sky fell. Seven months is nothing. Seven months is a semester. Seven months is less time than it takes to grow a human being. But you fit a whole life into seven months, because that's what you did, you were efficient even in love, even in joy, and you wrung every good thing out of every day like you knew, somewhere underneath your stubbornness, that the days were numbered.
I don't think you actually knew. I think that's just who you were. Someone who refused to waste things.
You learned to cook in our kitchen. Badly, at first, spectacularly badly, and then with a competence that bordered on aggression. You made things out of nothing. You could turn potatoes and spite into a meal that made Pietro groan with happiness. You argued with the stove like it was a person who had wronged you. You burned yourself constantly and refused to acknowledge it, and I would find you later, running cold water over your fingers with your jaw set, and I would take your hand and hold it and you would let me, which was the most intimate thing you ever did, letting me take care of something you could have handled alone.
We walked everywhere. You hated sitting still. You knew every street in the city, every shortcut, every place where the wall had crumbled enough to climb through, every rooftop that was worth the risk. You showed me Sokovia through your eyes and it looked different, still broken, still wounded, but interesting. You were interested in everything. You wanted to know why the buildings leaned, and where the water went, and what the old church had looked like before the fire, and who had lived in the boarded up house on the corner, and why the dogs in the eastern district were all missing the same ear.
"Someone is doing that on purpose," you said. "Someone is marking them."
"Why?" I said.
"I don't know yet," you said, and the yet was the most you thing I had ever heard.
You fought with me, too. I want to tell you that because I don't want to make you into something you weren't. You were difficult. You were stubborn past the point of reason. You had opinions about everything and you defended them like territory. You once didn't speak to me for two days because I said I didn't think the poet you loved was that good, and when you finally broke the silence, it wasn't to apologize, it was to hand me a six page argument, handwritten, with citations, about why I was wrong.
I kept that paper. I kept it for years. I kept it through things you wouldn't believe.
We fought about the future. That was the big one. You wanted to leave Sokovia. You had plans, real plans, with timelines and contingencies and backup contingencies, because you were pathologically incapable of approaching anything without a strategy. You wanted to go west. You wanted university. You wanted a life that wasn't shaped by rubble and rationing and the sound of military trucks at night. And you wanted me to come with you.
And I wanted to. God, I wanted to. But I had Pietro, and Pietro had nowhere else to go, and I couldn't leave him, and you couldn't understand why I wouldn't ask him to come too, and I couldn't explain that Pietro didn't leave, Pietro endured. That was his way. And mine was to stay beside him. And yours was to run toward something better. And we loved each other desperately and completely, and we could not solve this.
I wish I could tell you that we solved it. That we found the answer. That I said yes, or you said okay, or we figured out some brilliant third option that let everyone win.
But we didn't get the chance.
Here is what I remember about the day. I'm going to say it once. I'm going to say it clearly. And then I'm going to put it down.
It was April. You were wearing the green coat even though it was too warm for it, because you had sewn a pocket into the lining and you kept your important things there, your papers, your notes, the emergency money you'd been saving since January. You were carrying a bag of apples because the market on the east side had them cheap that week, and you were excited about it in the way that only someone who grew up hungry gets excited about food, not joyful, exactly, but fiercely satisfied. Like you'd won something.
You were walking home. Our home, you'd started calling it that, even though you didn't officially live there, even though your things were technically still at your mother's place across the district. You'd started calling it home, and every time you said the word, I felt it land in my chest like a stone in still water.
I was at the apartment. Pietro was with me. We heard the first one and thought it was thunder. We thought it was weather. Can you believe that? We had lived through bombings before, our parents had died in one, and still, some stupid hopeful part of our brains said thunder.
The second one was closer.
By the third, the windows were gone, and the building across the street was gone, and the accordion player downstairs was screaming, and Pietro had me on the floor with his body over mine, and the world was noise and dust and the smell of burning concrete, and I was saying your name.
I was saying your name and you couldn't hear me.
Pietro went out. I don't know how long it lasted, time stops being time during things like that, it becomes just before and after, and everything in between is a single held breath. When the shelling stopped, the silence was worse. The silence was the sound of the world rearranging itself into something new and terrible.
I found you myself. Pietro tried to stop me. He knew before I did, I think. He had run through the streets and come back with a face I had never seen on him, and he said Wanda in a voice that wasn't his voice, and I knew what that meant and I refused to know it at the same time.
You were two blocks from home. Two blocks. The building on the corner, the one with the bakery that had closed years ago, the one with the green door that matched your coat, had come down, and you were beneath it.
I found your hand first. Your impossible, restless, beautiful hand, reaching out from under the dust like you were still trying to grab the world by its edges and make it make sense.
I held it.
I held it and it was warm and then it wasn't.
And the Stark Industries logo on the side of the missile casing sat in the rubble like a signature on a letter no one had asked for.
I became something after that.
I don't need to tell you what, I think if you're anywhere, if you can hear this, you've seen it.
You've seen what I did with the rage you left behind. You've seen the things I let them do to me because I didn't care anymore what happened to my body once yours was gone. You've seen the red. You've seen what I built and what I destroyed and how the line between those two things stopped mattering.
I think you would have hated it.
No, I think you would have understood it, and hated it anyway. That's more honest. You were always more honest than I was. You would have looked at me with that serious expression, the one from the night you kissed me, the one that said I have done the math, and you would have said, "Wanda, this is not a strategy. This is a tantrum. Tantrums don't have exit plans."
And you would have been right.
And I would have kept going anyway, because the only person who could have stopped me was under two blocks worth of rubble in a city that doesn't exist anymore, and her hand was cold, and her coat was green, and her name was the last word on my lips every night for years, and I was so angry, my love. I was so angry that the world got to keep existing without you in it.
I'm still angry.
I'm just tired now too.
Here is what I want to say to you, at the end of everything, from this nowhere place, in this nowhere dark..
You were right about the sand.
I have lost everything. I have lost you, and Pietro, and myself, and a version of reality that I built with my bare hands because I couldn't survive the one I was given. I have lost wars and won nothing. I have been the villain and the weapon and the cautionary tale. I have been the thing that people warn their children about.
But I remember what the drawing looked like. The river doesn't get to take that part.
I remember the green coat and the too long sleeves and the hand gestures and the bruise on your jaw from the doorframe. I remember batteries. I remember the six page handwritten argument with citations. I remember the soup, and the flu, and you need to put more salt in this. I remember your hands on my face and the sound you made when you kissed me and the way the lamp cut your face into gold and shadow. I remember the apples. I remember home.
I remember that for seven months, in a city made of rubble, someone loved me like I was a real person. Not a weapon. Not a warning. Not a story about what happens when grief gets too big for the body that carries it.
Just a girl.
You loved me like I was just a girl.
And I was. With you, I was.
The tide came. The drawing's gone. But I know what it looked like.
actually caring about the rights and safety of children is so stressful right now because a large amount of the time I'm sitting there internally screaming "THAT'S WORSE. THAT POLICY IS GOING TO ACTIVELY CAUSE HARM TO CHILDREN YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE." and nobody cares because it's not actually about protecting children but the thing is children actually do need more protection very badly, just not like that. REALLY not like that. and the things that would actually protect children (education, greater personal autonomy, access to knowledge and resources that don't hinge on their parents being willing/able to provide them) would give adults less absolute power over them and that upsets too many people who see children as status symbols and tools and extensions of themselves.
Being in the state of recovery where I'm in bed like. I'm bored. I want to get up. I want cookies. I want to go on a walk. I want to go do things. I want to sit by a fire. I want ice cream. I want to get up.
Then I get up and it's woaaaah I do not want to do any of those things.
Currently feeling like I got kicked in the gut by a horse. I'm not taking the painkillers - not as some sort of a Suffering Martyrdom Fetish Weird Flex, but because I'm not in pain if I'm sitting in good positions and not moving wrong. The only pain I experience are mild stings of Hey Perhaps Do Not Do That, which are welcome reminders that I'm doing something wrong. Not an ache like a headache or tooth ache, but very polite little jolts of Can You Fucking Not. Turning them off would be actively worse for my recovery.
You're using your painkillers like we'd give them to horses in low doses so they have that same "hey, don't do that" feedback loop lmao. Speedy recovery!
It's not supposed to hurt, but it's better than not feeling anything, it's not just pain that's blocked it's everything, it makes you not being able to think to remember what you were doing.
And in time it doesn't help anyway just gets you addicted to more.
At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes
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