I stroke Milos fur, letting my fingers get lost in the thick locks.

“Would you go with me?” I ask him, as his brown eyes meets mine.

“Of course you would” I answer myself, and let my fingers spread out across his huge head, just the way he likes. He closes his eyes and let his head fill my lap.

“I am not even sure you would count as non-lethal” I tell him, and he answers with a sigh “All that aside, I wouldn’t risk your life. You take care of Emily and Elijah for me, yah?” He sits up just to cuddle closer, a guard dog that put fear in the bravest of men, but had never actually hurt anyone. We sit there for a moment, it is hours before the kids come home. The world is silent, and I listen to it, as I let my thoughts quiet down too.

Later, as I walk Milo, I pick some herbs and berries, the way my dad taught me many years ago - only now, the herbs are hiding in broken asphalt, ditches and nooks in the city. And it hits me. It shouldn’t just be non-lethal. I should be living. Like my dad did, knowing where and how to hide, which plants to pick and which to leave.

At home I let Milo go play with the kids, who just got home from work, and in a drawer in the kitchen - our only room, if we were honest - I find the old leather-bound book, dusty and almost forgotten. Mostly because we didn’t really need it: we knew what we needed for a life in the house. But out there, wherever that was - I would need his drawings and descriptions that he had drawn up long before the new regime took over. Before the forests were felled to build new houses and to make fire for new industries.

Only half of the notebook was used: he had told us to finish it and pass it down.

I open it on a random page. The dry smell, the crinkly pages, the dust itching my fingers, finding its way to my nose - and through all that, all those years in the drawer, he was still there, on the pages, his clumsy, hasty handwriting yet precise strokes of the drawings greeted me like an old forgotten friend.

“Elijah and Emily! Can you come here for a second?”

They reluctantly stop playing with Milo. They have not yet understood why I have to leave, and for now I am ok with that.

I kneel on the floor with them “So, you know I have to go on a trip, yah?”

“Yah…” they mumble, looking down.

“Well, when I come back, I want to teach you something. Something I was taught growing up”

“From your mom?” asked Emily, the oldest of the two

“No - back when I was little, we had something called school. So instead of work, I went to school. They taught me to read and write there”

“What is that, mom?” asked Elijah, and Emily looked at him with the contempt only older siblings can have for their younger “you dumb-dumb, it is when grown-ups draw boring pictures that don’t even look like anything on paper and other grown ups looks at it”

“Emily.” I said, “be nice to your brother. I will be away for a long time, so you have to take care of each other.

But yes, Emily. Writing is when you draw words on paper. But do you know sometimes when we are on the swings in the evening, and we tell each other stories? When you write, you can keep the stories longer or give them to others. I want you to be able to do that. And to tell each other what you know, even when you are not together.”

“Ok mom. Can we go play now?”

“Yes. Of course.”

The yellow light of the sunset fill our home as they play with Milo, still not knowing how their lives could have been.

Later I understood that the book didn’t just give me the knowledge I needed. It reminded me of who I was, what I had come from - and why I needed to get back to my family. And that I had to teach all the kids I could to read and write. In times like these, reading is an act of rebellion.