Curate, connect, and discover
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Sabine is looking for someone.
She doesn’t know who she’s looking for, but she has to find them.
But she’s so small. She can barely toddle around now. She should be bigger than this, some memory tells her, but she doesn’t know why.
She is too young to understand what’s happened to her.
She is too young to even understand the concept of a memory.
Still, Sabine must find this person. They need her. They trust her.
When she racks her tiny little brain to figure out who she needs to find, all she gets are the barest crumbs of memories—nothing enough to help her. So she forces herself up on her feet, gripping the wall and the hands of adults who pass her in the halls as she stumbles along. She crawls under sofas and peeks under beds and goes into dark closets, looking for the-one-who-she-must-find.
It’s while she is under the bed in the fourteenth guest room she’s explored that she finally breaks down in tears. It doesn’t help, but she can’t stop herself. Crying is the only thing she’s any good at. She’s useless, useless. She’s tired and her knees ache from crawling along once her legs got too wobbly to carry her anymore. She’s searched and searched, every chance she gets, every day for a time that feels like years, and she has found nothing.
She swipes at her face with her clumsy, baby-chubby hands, smearing dust and tears of frustration across her cheeks, then hiccuping as she tries to stop another wail.
Sabine knows there’s more (a face, a gift, a goodbye, a promise) and it’s there, somewhere, but she can’t remember it, and it burns her up inside that she can’t. She can’t, but she has to, because—because she must!
Choking and gasping around her sobs, she scrubs her eyes again, and makes herself think. She must search. She must find.
The barracks, she decides. The rooms where the warriors sleep. Those have plenty of nooks and crannies. Perhaps the-one-who-she-must-find will be there.
She crawls out from under the bed, whimpering because her knees are rubbed raw and speckled with blood, and pulls herself up to stand. She just has to put one foot in front of another, and keep going until she has finished what she set out to do.
Words drift into her mind as she staggers along. It’s a voice she’s never heard. (It’s a voice she knows by heart.)
I—
I know I can—
The echo slips away like sand through her fingers, and she is left with nothing but the dust bunnies stuck to her little tunic and the memory of memories. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. She will still look.
Because this person, the-one-who-she-must-find—they are out there, somewhere.
I know I can count on—
Sabine must find them.
She must bring them home.