Read the journal

You sit back in your seat and settle in to read this journal that you have to suppose is yours. It naturally opens to the most recent page, bookmarked by a hospital discharge notice and several letters.

Skimming over the pages of the notice, a few phrases jump out at you from the otherwise boilerplate document: “People’s State of Chicagoland”, “Chicagoland Institute of General Medicine”, “prolonged period of severe influenza”, “People's Commissariat for Public Health.” On the next page, there’s a clean bill of health that states your vital statistics like name, birthplace, age, marital status, weight, height, and―

“Semen quality:” you can’t help but read out loud, blinking, “A-.” You decide to put the notice down now. Your eyes flit over to the journal’s page, written in beautifully flowing cursive:

Day 56 and I was finally informed that I am going to be released from the hospital. The doctors have finally decided that I am well enough that they can let me leave under my own power, though the only place that I have left to go is back home to Liberal.

You sigh heavily.

The University it would seem has de-matriculated me in my absence, though they have imploring me to apply again to study in the Fall of the year. It is unfortunate but alas, understandable, considering I have been bedridden for near enough two months unable to get up and walk, never mind attending classes or examinations. Thankfully the fever, the weakness, and the brain fog is just about gone now and I have been able to bring much of my documentation and notes with me to continue my studies on my own.

You scan over the discharge documents again, but the additional handwritten notes on it are illegible cursive. You go back to reading the next journal entry.

Staying in a cheap hotel room tonight, I spent the day preparing to make the trip home. I bought a ticket from the USSR Central Office for the noon train tomorrow to Liberal, Kansas and my student discount still worked! Cobbled together my belongings left at the dorm, said good bye to my friends there. Called the house phone from a pay phone at the university and Maxine answered. Apparently her, Carrie, Addie, and Mama are doing well themselves, though they were worried when I stopped sending them letters. Dad apparently has been rather scarce, Mama and Auntie Violet are having a tiff about it, since Auntie Violet is trying for another child despite the trouble she had having two, bless her heart. Furthermore, she heard that Auntie Aster might be trying to convince Mama to get me hitched up to one of the Featherstone girls again, so once more into that fresh Hell of a fray.

I just don’t know what Auntie Aster sees in those girls, in that family, other than obviously their vast tracts of land. How old fashioned she is! Shopping around for whoever will give the family the most land for my groom price! Infinitely grateful to Mama for shielding me from Auntie Aster’s attempts to have me married off before going to university. Damn her and her supposed rights as the eldest among equals! Though I suppose that if Auntie Bryony, Auntie Camellia, or Auntie Violet had even the slightest bit of collective backbone to say to Auntie Aster’s face what they talk about when they visit Mama for coffee or to pick up Dad then this would not be an issue.

That is one thing that I do not look forward to about going back home. No matter how you look at it, in a modern nation like this one, there is no reason to perpetuate counter-revolutionary customs like that. All this garbage about my groom price and arranged marriages were supposed to have gone to the dustbin of history decades ago with the revolution! They’re barbaric! They’re misandrist! In Chicago at least, they respected my autonomy and my personhood as a man!

It will all be fine John, it will all be fine. I just need to reapply to go back to school in the fall and try my best not to get married off and dragged away by some family of dairy farming bumpkins before the semester starts, their large tracts of land be damned. Then I can go back to Chicago, finish my education and really start my life as an emancipated man with ambitions and goals in my life beyond being referred to as a country stud to be kept barefooted and at home. Just need to survive a few short months out in the sticks and I will be ready to start all over again. You can do that, right?

You close the journal, somehow knowing less about who you are supposed to be with every passing moment.