Dreams in a Silver Locket by Maria Kukshyna

When you are constantly changing places, you begin to forget

what it means to be at home. You are never at home.

You submit to the rules of others, you tolerate their habits, and you learn to live around them. Similar to a soldier who carefully calculates each step on a mined field. You keep looking for the tiniest free corner in the house to fill with something, just so you can proudly call that space “yours.” But the catch is you will never have something of your own when your life can fit into a suitcase.

Despite all of the moving, I managed to save one thing that reminds me of home. It is a silver locket with a photo of my mom and dad on their wedding day. And I always wear it close to my heart.

I don’t remember my parents. Moreover, I have never had a chance to know them. They died in a car crash when I was two. Since then, I lived with my grandmother, who, unfortunately, joined my parents in heaven far too soon, around the time I turned fourteen. I don’t know why it happened. One day she was just gone. Maybe the grief for my mother was too strong for her to bear with.

I don’t remember clearly what happened next. What I do recall are countless foster homes and orphanages, one after another, and various faces of social workers calling me “a difficult child” and “an ill-behaved offspring.”

Now when I’m older, I still can’t seem to find a place to settle. My job is great for people like me, who don’t have a sentiment for their location. I’m a salesperson. The type of bastard who knocks on your doors at 9 p.m. to sell you things you could easily order from Amazon. The payment is a joke. The working hours are taunting. And I always have to share an apartment with at least two of my colleagues.

Yet, in the times of distress, I love to open my locket and look at the picture of my parents. At my beautiful mother in her wedding gown. At my father in his probably secondhanded but well-tailored suit. Their happiness makes me smile every time. When I study their faces, I can’t stop imagining what our life could be like. How my father would teach me to ride a bike. Or how my mother would welcome me from school with something tasty and cozy – something that other mothers bake for their children.

But all of that is gone the second I close my heart-shaped locket. All of the dreams have perished after I hear a click of two metal pieces colliding and locking away my hope for the future I will never have.

I always hide it under my shirt. And only a thin silver chain that glares in the sun could give it away.