The day that I was 2,000 miles away from home

I got a severe cold the day I was 2,000 miles away from home. That day, I finally went back to my grandpa’s house, two thousand miles east, saying goodbye to my twenty-year-old home. The Siberian wind bit my fingers and stabbed needles into the back of my neck. The road home was tiring, but I couldn’t help thinking about the chair that my daughter made for me.
I love to play the violin. Every day at home, my daughter would sit there and look at me with her beautiful eyes and ask if I had a new song for her. I would answer, of course, and play the new song that I had been creating all the time on the way back home. One day, my little girl was crying. I asked her why. She cried and said that she felt guilty for always sitting down while I stood up and played such a heavy instrument. I laughed and said, why don’t you make a chair for Dad? I didn’t think much more about it, but the next day, I saw her fumbling between the wooden sticks and asking our neighbors to help. It was an interesting sight to see: a little girl and an old carpenter working secretly on a project.

It was that Thursday I rushed home after watching news of the attack. It said the bomb had landed just around my neighborhood. I closed my eyes, hoping that the old gentleman had protected my daughter. I arrived in front of my apartment. There were loose scraps of wood everywhere, and the air was filled with a grayish hue. I saw that wooden chair in the center of the room, but all I needed was my daughter. I dug between the loose rocks and threw everything out of the way.
“It can’t be, it can’t be”

But at that moment, no matter how strong I was, I couldn’t push back the force of time. The old gentleman shielded my daughter’s body, and my daughter protected my violin. They all had accidentally walked out of time, and once they escaped, they were forever imprisoned on that timeline. And I am still moving on, getting pushed by the force of time. I could still feel the warmth of her small hands guiding mine as we strung together the first splintered stick. As I stood there, I sat down on my daughter’s gift and performed one last violin song for her.

Years passed. Some soldiers came and drank coffee on the chair. Some tourists came to revisit this story. But I was two thousand miles away from my home. I wish the cold could take me to my daughter.