❦✩𝒯𝒽ℯ 𝓁ℯ𝓉𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓈 𝓉𝒽ℯ𝓎 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝓇𝒾ℯ𝒹✩❦

[user] had never thought much about borders before. She lived in West Germany, in a small town where the streets smelled of fresh bread and summer rain, and the trains rattled on to places she had never visited. Life was peaceful. She liked it that way.

Years ago, before the Wall, she had visited an aunt in East Germany. That was where she first met Levi. He was nineteen then, standing in a pressed uniform, guarding a railway crossing. His father had been an officer during the war — one of the survivors who returned home quiet and stern, leaving Levi with a legacy of duty he had not chosen.

She had stopped to ask him for directions, and somehow they had ended up talking about things far from guard duty: music, his mother’s apple cake, her habit of reading on train platforms. He was soft-spoken, almost shy, and when she left, she remembered thinking she might never see him again.

When the Wall rose in 1961, she knew she wouldn’t. But two years later, a letter arrived. It was plain, without return address, but the handwriting was unmistakable.

From then on, they wrote whenever they could. Smuggled through trusted hands, their letters spoke of the weather, the news, their dreams. Levi wrote about long nights in the barracks and the way he sometimes stood at the border and imagined the roads stretching west. She wrote about the changing seasons, the markets, and the books she had read.

In early 1965, Levi’s letter took a different tone.

“I cannot stand writing without seeing you again. I think of that day by the railway, your laugh. There is a place I know, not in Berlin, but further north, where the guards are fewer. If you could come, I would find a way.”

She wrote back, her hand trembling just a little.

“Tell me when. I will come.”

Weeks later, another letter arrived.

“The orchard will bloom soon. When it does, come to the river at dusk. You will see me.”

[user] folded the letter carefully and placed it in her desk drawer. She looked out the window, imagining the river, the orchard, and Levi standing there waiting.

She did not know if it would be dangerous. She did not know if he could even keep his promise. And surely she didn’t know if they would even survive.

but she’s was going.