Chapter 11: The Language That Climbed Mountains

 

I was born into a language that never asked permission to survive.

It had no empire.

No parliament.

No borders drawn upon maps.

It traveled differently.

Inside memory.

Inside songs.

Inside families.

I am Vlach.

People often ask what that means.

I never know how to answer.

It is easier to show than to explain.

A path climbing through the Pindus Mountains before sunrise.

The sound of sheep bells echoing through the mist.

Women weaving beside wooden looms.

Bread rising beneath linen cloth.

Cheese aging in cool stone cellars.

Children learning the names of stars before they learned the names of cities.

That is my language.

Not merely words.

A way of walking through the world.

Our people rarely built kingdoms.

We built routes.

From mountain to mountain.

From valley to valley.

We followed seasons instead of borders.

Perhaps that is why Mars never frightened me.

The first Vlachs crossed mountains carrying little more than animals, tools, and hope.

The first settlers crossed space carrying oxygen, machines, and dreams.

The distances changed.

The instinct did not.

When I repair a suit on Mars, I sometimes think about the loom in Seli.

The shuttle moved exactly as my needle moves now.

Back and forth.

Joining separate threads into something stronger than either one alone.

Perhaps every civilization begins the same way.

Someone learns to weave.

Someone learns to mend.

Someone refuses to throw away what can still be repaired.

Outside the habitat, the Martian desert stretches without end.

Inside me, another landscape remains.

Beech forests after rain.

Cold streams running over smooth stones.

The smell of wood smoke at dusk.

The voices of my mother and Cornelia drifting through the old house.

Sometimes I whisper a few words in Vlach.

No one understands them here.

Not because the language is forgotten.

Because it belongs to another altitude.

Another wind.

Another silence.

Yet I speak it anyway.

Languages do not disappear when they are no longer useful.

They disappear when they are no longer loved.

I refuse to let that happen.

One day, perhaps, a child born on Mars will ask me where I come from.

I will not begin with Greece.

Nor with Europe.

Nor even with Earth.

I will begin with the mountains.

Because mountains teach the first lesson every traveler must learn.

You do not conquer them.

You listen to them.

Perhaps that is why we survived.

And perhaps that is why I am here.

Not despite being Vlach.

Because I am.

...to be continued...