This is really just a scene from a novel I haven't ever written fully (it's just a long and complicated thread of thoughts) and so there's not much background. 

*****

Ontario, 1850.

"I don't know why I miss him," my sister Máiréad confided in me.

I furrowed my brow and pulled tight another perfect stitch. "You haven't seen him in three, four years. Shouldn't the memory have faded?"

Máiréad shook her head and put another log on the dying fire. "It really should have- but it hasn't, not at all. Some days I miss him as if I'd lost him yesterday. I can't explain it very well. It's a space in my heart nothing's been able to fill. I'm still as much as child as when we left, Caoimhe, and that part of my being is going to be a child until he comes back. Until I find him." She went quiet, staring into the flames. Tears formed in her eyes, though from memories or the heat I couldn't tell.

"What if he doesn't?" I have no idea what possessed me to say that in the moment.

Máiréad's eyes flicked down before staring straight ahead again. "How do you mean that?"

"I mean," I began gently, "that anything could have happened. He had nothing back across the sea. And-" for some reason I put down my sewing to take my sister's pale hand- "We've left Ireland for good. We're in another country. Who knows where he's gone? If he's still-"

"Don't say that!" My sister cut me off and pulled away her trembling hand. Her round green eyes looked at my very soul. A child's hope still lived in them. A foolish, stupid, girlish hope. "He'll come back to me. I'll find him, even if I have to sail around the world a hundred times and wash Queen Victoria's feet. I'll even go back to Ireland and starve if I have to."

"But the potatoes... Máiréad, it's very likely he's starved to death with the rest of Ireland."

A tear slid down my heartsick sister's face. "He's alive. I can feel it."

There was a pause, where I tried to be as gentle as I could, and Máiréad cried silently.

"Máiréad, it's time to leave Ciarán in Ireland. Let him go."

"No. I can't." Máiréad turned to the frosty window of the one-room basement apartment we shared. She folded her hands on her shabby skirt. "I never left Ireland. I see it every night in my dreams." She searched the darkening, twilight street outside the tiny window. "I miss green hills and having others who speak our language, not ridicule our tiny English vocabulary. I miss at least knowing what was in my future, even if it did just include marrying and farming barely enough potatoes to keep alive. I miss dancing, talking, and feeling wanted. There's none of that here. Here they just treat us like something nasty on the street, like a flea or a rat. Nobody wants us here." There was a bitter sadness in her voice, sadness that did not suit her angelic appearance.

Could she really speak of loss? Máiréad was not my sister by birth, but rather my husband's sister. My husband, who had starved with our son, and whom I had loved and still cannot bear to speak the name of. She had not lost a husband, a child, or even parents to the hunger, nor to the wretched conditions on the ship, or the hell that was here.

Then it came to me: Máiréad had lost just as much as I had. She was a daughter of Ireland through and through, while I had always yearned for other lands. She'd never had the chance to love, while I'd had a full two years with my husband. So I'd lost him, and my son, but she had lost her homeland, her identity, and any chance at love.

"You miss him."

"Yes," she responded simply, standing and leaning her forehead against the high window. "I do."

The novel this came from will likely never be written down in its entirety. It was the story of the two sisters who came from Ireland during the Great Famine and it was very realistic. Honestly, it came down to the fact that a) I should branch out from writing stories set in/with characters from Ireland and b) it was really kinda depressing, to think of the total horrors faced by these people. The research was bumming me out big time.

But this was my favourite scene, I think it showed the emotion of of the women very well and sometimes I just really like writing sappy scenes. It makes me feel better about my life, I guess.

~Megan