Miriam's Three Letters: A Passover Story for our Time of Agonies
How is this post different from all others?
Like many of you, I have been crushed by fury and terror since early October, witnessing the genocidal campaign of politicized revenge in Gaza and beyond, waged by an extreme-right Israeli regime. This has been aided and abetted by cynical Western countries like Canada, where I am a citizen, and (especially) Germany, where I currently reside.
As a Jew, I feel an abyss of shame widen inside of me because of what is being done in my name, and because so many other Jews are cheerleading or excusing these atrocities. I can barely stand it. I feel like I am losing my heart and mind.
I grew up in an anti-Zionist home, the very proud son of Larry and Judy Haiven, two life-long Palestine-solidarity activists who helped to found Independent Jewish Voices Canada and who both write and organize extensively. Today, we anti-Zionist Jews are, thankfully, numerous. In recent years, a whole generation of young Jews has broken ranks with the dream of a modern Zionist state and are placing themselves on the front line of an internationalist struggle for a common humanity. We are also reinventing and reclaiming many Jewish traditions.
But when I was growing up there were not so many of us, and my parents found themselves banished from the Jewish “community” in the small Canadian cities where my brother Omri (also an inspiring activist) and I were raised. As a result, we had to invent our own traditions, including Passover, the yearly Spring celebration of the ancient Hebrews’ liberation from slavery in Mitzrayim (an ancient word we use to distinguish that empire of millennia ago from the present-day land of Egypt).
As an adult, I have annually hosted my own Seders (Passover ceremonies), inviting my friends, comrades and community—most of them not Jewish—to join a ritual to celebrate the return of the Spring and to recommit ourselves to the struggle for collective liberation. At times, we’ve had more than 70 people gather for evenings where we travelled together, over a meal and (at least) four cups of wine, from solemnity to debauchery, from sorrow to joy, from the sacred to the sensuous. It is one of my favourite moments of every year, one which always ends in the revolutionary toast “fuck the police!”
The Passover story, for me, has always been the story of a revolution. It is a moment to gather and recognize what we are and what we could become, together.
A Passover Seder is guided by a document called a Haggadah and I have written several over the years, combining ancient Jewish traditions with contemporary politics and poetry. I’ve often borrowed from other anti-Zionist Haggadahs shared online. But I have never been satisfied with the centrepiece of that document, the Maggid or story, which recounts the familiar story of Moses leading the great exodus. So when I started organizing Seders with my friend Marc Herbst in Berlin in 2022, I decided to rewrite the Maggid as well. The result, which I share here, was tested and refined over several Passovers, and has improved thanks to the advice of many wonderful friends.
I reimagined it, heretically, to centre the revolutionary role of Miriam, elder sister of Moses, who has largely been written out of the tradition except for her famous role putting the baby Moses in a basket in the Nile. I based her on many of the revolutionary women I have known. I am sharing that story with you now after receiving some requests to post it publicly so it can be incorporated into other people’s Haggadot, and I hope it is interesting even to those who read it but do not observe this holiday.
I’m shairng it, but with deep trepidation. It’s not only that I am overwhelmed by the power and history of this story, which is known to and sacred for almost anyone raised in a so-called Abrahamic faith. It’s not only that it is a story that has been pivotal to Jewish identity and survival for so many millennia. It’s also that this year, amidst my fury and sorrow and shame, sharing this story feels like a profoundly insufficient gesture. Not only insufficient: indulgent, even insulting. How can we celebrate Passover at a time like this, when we ought to dedicate all our efforts to halting a genocide, to confronting the world that this genocide is making all around it? How can we take pride and find joy in a tradition that is inspiring and justifying the butchery of Palestinians, the shredding of international law, the humiliation of humanity itself? I tried to imbue this story with many of the things I love and admire about the radical diaspora Jewish culture that produced me. But what are they compared to the monument of agonies being erected now in the so-called “promised land”?
I have no answer for this, except I can’t surrender that part of who I am that was produced by a long history of radical internationalist diaspora Jews. They taught me that safety never comes from an armed state but only from the solidarity we build with other people who yearn for collective liberation. They taught me that our only home is where we make it, in the painfully glorious, sweetly confused multiplicity of the world. Like Miriam in this story, we have to refuse even when everything seems impossible.
If Passover is about anything it is about how a story spurred a revolution that changed the world. I have no such pretensions, but as the people of Gaza are teaching us in so many ways, a little beauty in the ruins can go a very long way.
Miriam’s First Letter
Oh, to be a prince and never have to ask yourself who made your world and why.
Dear M,
How does a slave, begin a letter like this? A letter on which her life depends, on which her world hinges? Yet she already suspects that her reader, her only hope, may not believe a word of it?
You see me every day, but you don't know me. I've known you all your life, but you haven't spoken a word to me in a decade. My name, Miriam, was the first word you tried to speak, before your stutter, before you were taught to believe the language of this foreign land was your mother tongue, before your anger could kill.
Yesterday, I was among those slaves who watched you, a son of the royal house, strike down that overseer. We saw his blood seep into the sand, mingling with the blood of the slave he had been beating. We all knew him, that overseer. We hated him for what he had done to us or those we loved. His blood was a miracle: they can be killed; we could be free.
As you stood over the body of the cruel man whose skull you had crushed, your royal robes of the finest white cotton now stained red, I could see the question in your troubled eyes: Why would you, a prince, kill your grandfather's soldier to save the life of this wretched, stupid slave? Why should you have cared?
Something fierce inside you woke from a dream and it will never go back to sleep.
I saw it awaken, and I was glad. Satisfied like a farmer who takes care sowing her seeds in the autumn is pleased when they erupt from the soil in the Spring. I chose you. I treasured you. I cultivated you. But you, like a proud seedling pushing up through the dirt towards a sun it has never known, you were ignorant of my this work.
You grew up believing you were a son of the pharaoh's house. Why did you feel you were born under the wrong star? Why did the injustice that cradled you every day haunt you every night? Why couldn't you join your fellow noblemen in the sadistic games they play with the bodies of the powerless? Were you cursed by the strange animal-headed gods? Were you broken?
The truth: you are in fact one of us, a slave turned into a prince, and I was the author of this ascension. We have made an improbable gamble on you, M, and now we can only pray that it pays off.
It was I, your sister by birth, who saved you from the wrath of the man you now call your grandfather, our oppressor for many generations. In the year of your birth he heard a prophecy that one of us, born that year, would destroy him and his dynasty. And so he decreed that all of our people’s male infants should be slaughtered.
Nothing can be done, our people wailed as the soldiers moved house to house. But something can always be done. One must always refuse.
When our real mother—yours and mine—delivered you in those dark days, it was I who hid you from the Pharaoh's murderous men. I wove the lumber reeds of the great river into a basket and coated that basket with pitch and so created a floating cradle for you and in it I placed you, bawling and screaming, in the gentle arm of the river.You see I was a favourite slave to Her Majesty, the Pharaoh's first born daughter—that woman you think of as your mother. I arranged it so that my superstitious mistress, bereaved at her recent miscarriage, would find you there in that basket in the river and would imagine that you were a gift from her false gods, a replacement for her own lost child. It was I who suggested to the Pharaoh's daughter that our own true mother might act as a wet-nurse to you, so that you grew up for a time among your real kin.
And as you grew in our dusty house, a slave-child dressed like a prince, it was I who secretly taught you to speak and sing in our forbidden language, though I am sure you believe you have forgotten it.
And what about four years later, on that sad day in the dry season when the Pharaoh's first-born daughter, the woman you imagine is your mother, came to collect you to be raised and educated in the palace? It was I who whispered comforts to you in our soft language, and dried your tears, taught you to encrypt your true heart in a chamber inside you more secret than even the pharaoh’s golden tomb.
In their palace they raised you as a haughty prince. You learned not to tell one slave from another, so I doubt you recognized me in those years, though you saw me every day and issued me orders many times as I served in the palace. It had to be this way. But it was I who recommended to the Pharaoh's daughter the name of our wisest sage, a slave, who could serve as your tutor. He was the brooding man who also secretly taught me to read and write, too. And so I write to you now in this language that is foreign to both of us, through it is the only one we now share, this language of empire and of heartbreak.
It was I who consulted with that sage on how to instruct you to bring out your courage, your visions, your mystic eye. Do you think your interests in prophecy, in justice, in revolution were accidental? Do you think your sense of duty and pride is yours alone? Did you never wonder why you sing strange wordless songs to yourself? Oh, to be a prince! You never once had to ask yourself who made your world and why.
But we have, secretly, raised you into our champion. Even your name tells the truth. You have been taught by your adoptive mother, the Pharaoh's arrogant daughter, that your name means beloved one. Yes, she was infatuated with you from the moment she found you floating in the reeds. In our language, however, your name means that which is drawn out: the short straw drawn from a bundle; the white-hot brand, fresh from the fire; the wild card in an otherwise rigged deck.
I’m sure these words will come as little comfort to you, forced to run from all you have ever known. With the overseer’s blood on your hands, you now find yourself an exile, a beggar. You must, of course, flee your grandfather the Pharaoh and his wrath. Like all tyrants he can sense the insurrection brewing behind our too-wide smiles and too-deep bows. He loves you, in the way powerful men love themselves reflected in others. But he would execute even you.
It’s not simply that you killed his overseer: he has more than enough men like that. It’s that, in doing so, and in acting to defend a slave, you broke his thousand-year spell. You have shown our people that the Pharaoh's rule is vulnerable and arbitrary. We can no longer avoid the reality that it does not need to be this way. You must flee because that spark could start a wildfire. Every tyrant fears the imagination.
But if you somehow read this as you wander in the desert, I want you to know that your actions in these recent days were not entirely an accident. They weren't the result of your will alone. Your fate is a tree that we, that I, planted and cultivated, not knowing if it could grow in this harsh landscape, not knowing what fruit it would bear, sweet or bitter, cure or poison. We could not have predicted your killing of that particular overseer, but we set the stage for it, or something like it. I did. It was me, brother. It was the one who has always loved you and always will.
What comes next? Your actions have shown our people that this system of domination can be challenged and they want liberation, and revenge. They will tell stories of you, and that you will return to lead us. I will tell these stories, and so will our brother, the wily Aaron, our greatest storyteller. Do we need you? No, not on one level: we will rebel, and you are only one man among thousands. But our people need a myth, a story, to give us hope, and you now play that role, even if you never asked to.
My hope is that this letter, which I will sneak into your travel bags, will find you, that you read it, and that you believe it. I hope you will return to us with an army or with powerful magic and fulfill your destiny to liberate our people. And when you come back, I hope you will remember that whatever magic you possess is not yours alone but the gift of all of us, and of all those who came before us who were never allowed to dream, a gift for all those who will be born from the stories we tell.
I love you.
Your sister, M.
Miriam’s Second Letter
Hope is what they will say we must have had, after we’ve won
Dear M,
So, you finally write me back, years late. It takes a mysterious pyrotechnics show in the desert for you to write to your sister after so many years? You wrote that you now believe me and my letter, which I imagined you had forgotten or simply never received. The words of your own sister were not enough I see; you only trust the voice of your Lord you hear in your head? How typical.
I hope you will indulge my teasing. If I am honest, I write with tears of happiness in my eyes to learn you are alive, that you received my letter from all those years ago, and that now, for whatever reason, you have come to believe me and have determined to return to us in Mitzrayim.
Mine are also tears of joy to learn from your letter that I have a sister in your young wife, and also nephews, your sons! Don't be scandalized, dear brother, but I don’t share my bed with men, so I will trust you and your brother Aaron to bring children to our family. Hurry to us, dear M. Your brother, Aaron has already set out to meet you.
Now, to politics. I honestly do not know what to make of the strange tale you have related to me in your letter. You write that you met God's messenger in the form of a continuously burning bush deep in the desert. You write that it gave you instructions, powers and magical gifts for this all-powerful God. You write that this messenger told you to return and to liberate us. You write that this God, the god of our ancestors, promised us sweet lands on the other side of the desert, if we followed his laws. You write that you intend to follow these instructions and return to lead us to this new home.
M., let me tell you that most of us enslaved people believe this almighty god, whose emissary you say you met, abandoned us long ago. Whatever promise he made to our ancestor, Jacob, has clearly been broken: we live like beasts here in Mitzrayim. How could such a god permit this?
Now, you write that this god's emissary, this ever-burning bush, told you to present your case to our council of elders? This is extremely stupid. Any god who truly knew us would not give such idiotic advice. Those old men argue forever among themselves and do nothing! It is their one and only passion to disagree with one another and compete for the Pharaoh's bribes.
Any god who claimed us would know that it is we women who make the real decisions, not in the council hall but in the kitchens, laundries, brothels and bathhouses. Why did God not tell you to meet with us? Maybe he has never set foot in such places. And this magical staff you have been given - yes, perhaps it will impress those men. But unless I prepare their wives and daughters first, you will in fact get nowhere with them. I have, of course, already begun this work.
As hard as I find your story to believe, I can sense that you believe it. I will keep my skepticism to myself because it is most important that, when you arrive, you not waver from your conviction: we need a prophet, especially the young people, otherwise they have no hope. Myself, I do not care for hope. Struggle is what moves me. Our cause is likely hopeless, but that does not mean we can abandon it. Hope is what those who will come after us will say we must have had, after we’ve won our revolution.
This god you spoke to is right about one thing: you are certainly no great orator. I doubt your exile working as a shepherd has improved your public speaking powers, especially in our slave language, of which you probably only remember a few words. Aaron, our brother, is on his way to you now, and I coached him to be a mesmerizing speaker in both languages - you will need to keep him close.
M.: I know your heart, for I tended its growth like a prized rose. I know you are hiding from me your own misgivings. I am not only speaking of your fear. You are a dreamer and a thinker, one who loves mysteries and ambiguities, who delights in puzzles and contradictions. Now you have been cast by this God in the role of the leader who must be as certain as stone. I'm sorry, brother, but you will never overcome these insecurities, and I beg you to treasure them - they may be all that saves you from becoming a tyrant yourself.
But I speak also of another misgiving, which I share with you about this strange promise your God - our God - has made. He says he will rain down unspeakable misery on our oppressors, and not only against the arrogant family of the pharaoh, who deserve it (forgive me, for I know you care for some of them, but they do). No, this god also promises to unleash his wrath on every single person in Mitzrayim, even down to their slaves who are not of our people… how do these people deserve it? And what is worse, as these plagues devastate the people and the land, this God of your… of ours… also tells you He will harden the heart of the Pharaoh, their leader, so that he will not concede or negotiate. This will necessitate further, more ruthless and devastating terror. Why is this the price that must be paid? Isn’t there some other way?
M.: even presuming this vision you have had is real, how can we come to trust and worship such a god? Listen: I want revenge. I want it for the murders, for the fear, for the misery that I see every day. I want to avenge the humiliation, all the times we have had to watch illiterate soldiers make our wisest men act like dogs for their sport, for all the time they have taken our daughters away on their wedding nights. Most of all I want revenge for what their oppression has made of our people: I want revenge for the fear, small-mindedness and corruption they have instilled in us as we try to survive them.
But, M., you, a sweet boy, are my revenge. You, an unknowing spy in the Pharaoh's house, a dreamer, covertly trained to be our champion, you are the vindication I want.
I want freedom for our people, yes, of course. And, strangely, I also want freedom for our oppressors. The pharaoh, the man you thought of as your grandfather, is a living example of how, when a people become addicted to decadence built on the misery of others, their souls rot from the inside out. I want a revenge that ends this thing both our peoples have become.
But the revenge your God promises is something dark. I fear it will not liberate us but transform us into something terrible. This god pledges to petrify the hearts of our oppressors, make them ever more cruel… Wouldn’t it be enough if he, all powerful, performed some miracle and simply set us free? Why this sadism? Isn’t there another way?
I also want the land he has promised you, a country of our own. Or maybe that's the only way I can imagine freedom. I want to not be afraid. But do not others already live on these lands of milk and honey? And to whom, exactly, is it promised? Only to those who follow you? What about those who refuse to follow, those whose hearts or bodies do not allow them to follow? I wonder. But what other choice do we have?
Will you listen to the advice of a woman, your sister? I hope so. M, whether it is real or a figment of your imagination, this thing you saw, this burning bush, will give you a terrible power over our hearts, over our imaginations. As implausible as your story seems to me, I know our people are ready to believe it. They are ready to kill to make their belief into a reality. Maybe your god will create these plagues - frogs, a rain of blood, locusts... or maybe we will orchestrate these merciless plagues ourselves and then, later, tell our grand-children the heinous deed was God’s work, not ours.
But this god you have spoken with... M.: he is cruel, vindictive and manipulative. In his name we will grant ourselves the power to liberate ourselves from the greatest empire the world has ever known. But what will we become in the process?
Dear brother, keep your heart open. I will see you on the outskirts of the city where I long to hold you and your wife and sons. Meanwhile, we will prepare.
I love you.
Your sister, M
Miriam’s Third Letter
Your visions are like ropes that you climb with brawn and determination; mine are like ropes that fray into a hundred possible tangled ends
Dear M.,
A miracle. We are free. We have won.
But as we prepare to leave Mitzrayim forever, I wonder, what have we lost?
And I wonder, will you read this? We have not spoken in weeks. Yes, you are busy leading our revolution, but I wonder too, have you been avoiding me? Is there something inconvenient in my questions? Or maybe I have been avoiding you, as the plagues that you have unleashed wash over these people, as death spreads to every house…
Tonight, I held the body of a little boy in my arms. He was the same age as you when the Pharaoh's daughter came to claim you, all those years ago. This boy… our God struck him down for no reason. A sweet boy, with that unruly curl of hair. Like you, he was a dreamer, whose only crime was to be born to the wrong tribe... His mother would often come to the laundry where I worked, and she was so fucking funny. What a wit, with raunchy jokes and that toss of her hair.
Yes, her son would have grown up to be a soldier, one who would see me as filth. But in that moment, dead in my arms, he was a beautiful, stilled creature, a broken bird. His mother was a conduit for hell itself, torn apart by grief, her sly grin gone forever.
What is this God we have made, M.? And what is this god making of us? Our people are dancing for joy at this carnage. They are singing your name in the streets as we gather to make our exodus.
Yes: You and Aaron have been truly brilliant. Whether it is as you say and our god advised you every step of the way, or whether you and our brother orchestrated this ingenious plan, I cannot tell. But we have won our freedom.
The Pharaoh, shattered by pain, his dead kinsmen rotting in the halls of his palace, his servants and soldiers feld, has finally allowed us to leave, banished us, even.It happened exactly as you said it would: the more his people suffered, the more irrational the pharaoh became, as if this God of ours wanted him to murder his own people with the horrific plagues that his enchanted stubbornness necessitated.
Now, in a final act, our God has taken the firstborn of every house, not only of humans but even of animals. Your own adopted mother, M. - the pharaoh's beloved daughter, struck dead, coughing up her insides. The fields are in ruins, the smell of pestilence is on the land, the soil is as gray as the sky... and now we, their slaves, upon whom they depended for everything, we are leaving... how will the people of Mitzrayim survive?
Even stranger still, as crazed as the Pharaoh has become, his people are besotted with us. The same woman whose dead child I held insisted on giving me all her golden jewelry and, with a terrible earnestness, wished me well on our journey, kissed my hands, offered me the last of her food. How is it possible after one loses a child? I see our people taking advantage of this bewitched generosity.
I cannot help think that when, last night, we did as you told us and smeared lamb's blood on our doorframes to ward off this god's angel of death, we also lost something in that carnage. Something in us also died.
Dear M., please assure me that this thing we are doing will not simply be a turning of the tables but the overturning of them? My heart is sick and I long for a new land, a new life, more than anyone. But at what cost? Who will we be when we arrive?
And yet I also feel my blood hot with glory. We have built our revolution like we built their palaces, brick by brick, in defiance of history. You had the dream and shared it, with your quiet intensity. Aaron made it irresistible with his silver tongue and his diplomat’s grace.
But listen: I was the engineer, the one who could defy gravity and lift our people up. It was I who organized the people, calmed their fears, kept us together, organized hiding-places for our fighters, consoled the widows. I even convinced sisters and wives to betray the traitors among us, and had their throats quietly slit in the night. All of my work, invisible but essential. This revolution will be a monument that will be remembered for millennia. But I expect that I, a woman, will be written out of the story.
But when we tell this story to our grandchildren, what will this story make of them? You are not the only prophet in the family, M. I can foresee a time when this story we have made together will be a small candle in the darkest, coldest times for our people. It will keep their souls alive in times of oppression and grief.
You roll your eyes at my worries. Aren’t we to be free now? you ask your anxious sister. Oh my dear boy, yes, for a time. But only for a time. This Promised Land you will lead us to will not be ours forever: if we can take it as you foretell, others will take it from us in their turn, citing their own gods’ promises.
And, anyway, even in our own country there is nothing so special or righteous about us former slaves that we won't soon turn to being one another's pharaoh. And when we do become our own pharaoh, what role will this story of our revolution be made to serve?
No, you are not the only prophet in this family. Let me tell you a secret: most of us receive multiple visions of the future. Your visions are like ropes that you climb, hand over hand, in one direction, hauling yourself up with brawn and single-minded determination. Mine are like ropes that fray into a hundred possible tangled ends.
Make of that what you will, but hear this: last night, in my house protected by the lambs blood on the doorframe, while our god's angel of death slaughtered that funny woman's son, last night, I had three dreams.
In one we marched out of this dying city, led by a pillar of clouds by day, at night by a pillar of fire. As we came to the bank of the Red Sea the Pharaoh had a change of heart and sent his chariots after us. Night fell, we thought we were doomed. You raised that magical staff and the sea opened like a book and we walked down its spine to safety.
At dawn, as the last of us made it to the far shore, you wielded your staff like a scythe and the waves crashed down on our enemies and we watched them drown. There, on the far shore, I led us all in a song and a dance of thanks and joy that I felt I had known all my life. Even now I can remember every word and step.
We three kin--you, Aaron and I--led the people for years after that. We never made it to the Promised Land, but your children did.
But in the second dream we never even made it through the Red Sea. When you raised your staff, the waters did not part. We died on the near shore, waiting for a miracle. We died there not because of the Pharaoh's vengeance, but our own. As our hope faded, our newfound taste for blood turned us on one another and we drew our dirty knives and bled out in the desert.
The third dream? It is the hardest to relate, because in it I betray you.
Dear brother, we arrived at that far shore, indeed, free at last. But when the Red Sea had swallowed our enemies and we turned to look at ourselves, we found we were changed. And suddenly but certainly, some of us knew without and doubt that we were not wanted in your Promised Land, that we could not live by your father God’s strict commandments. And so we—those of us who never appeared in your visions, those of us who love one another wrongly, those of us whose bodies refuse not to rebel—we left you there, on that far shore.
Of course, you tried to reason with me. You shouted: you will be sacrificed on the altar of our own idealism. You screamed: No one will protect you out there among the savages. You cursed me and you begged me to stay and you cursed me again for making you beg. The hate in your eyes when I told you I was leaving was more vicious than any look you had ever given the Pharaoh.
But we, the exiles among the exiles, did not follow you two brothers to your Promised Land. We took that other road, snaking off into the morning mist, tears in our eyes. Maybe it is an endless road and we are cursed to be wanderers, forced to make our home wherever we are in the world. Maybe we will never have anything but one another. But we promised ourselves we would not stop until we created a city where there dwelled no gods and no masters.
M., I do not know which of these three visions will become the reality. I don’t know if we get to choose. Maybe in some way all three will occur, side-by-side, just as we three siblings, you, me and Aaron, live in eachothers’ light and shadow. We three gave birth to this revolution together and you have become what we hoped: a great leader, a prophet whose name will ring throughout the ages. We are all instruments of a common destiny. But destiny is taken, not given.
Brother, given what might happen tomorrow as we begin our exodus, I wanted to share with you a truth I have been keeping from you all these years of our struggle. Are you ready?You are not, really, my brother. At least not by blood. You are in fact the son of the now-dead woman you had thought of as your mother, the pharaoh's daughter. You are, in fact, the pharaoh’s own flesh and blood. It is true that my mother, the mother also of Aaron, nursed you. It is true I guided your education and cultivation. I did not know why, perhaps I was controlled by your god? And when, as a teenager, you killed that overseer and fled into exile, I saw my opportunity to instill in you a sense of purpose to serve our revolution. I sent you that first letter as an improbable gamble: the short straw drawn from a bundle. The white-hot brand, fresh from the fire. The wild card in an otherwise rigged game.
I think you will understand why I did it, why I lied to you. In any case, is what I did any worse than what your god has done, filling you with a sense of purpose towards his own ends, which I dare say are more bloodthirsty than mine.
But you are my brother in spirit. Blood means nothing in such matters - indeed after generations in captivity we are hardly all of the same blood anymore. We always make our families, some of us with more intention and care than others. It's late. The flatbreads our god instructed us to make are ready.
It’s dawn. Our people are gathering now on the edge of town, ready for our departure, hauling with them the treasures of this ruined land. You and Aaron will be at the head of the march, of course, as it is expected.
When you need me, find me at the back, with our old and our sick, trying to make sure no one gets left behind.
I love you.
Your sister, M.