THIS IS MINE

Ownership as a legal or economic category is recoverable; relational loss is not. The humans of the story are arguing over something recoverable (land, an animal, a claim) while what is actually destroyed is irreversible (a bond, a life, a family's means of continuing on their land).

Each act of "this is mine" costs the claimant something they do not intend to lose, even as it costs the dispossessed everything. In this story, the moral injury is to the one who harms, not only to the one who suffers.

This story asks us to imagine a life. Its first-person voice brings us near to labour, the small acts of attention that make a relationship possible, and memories, while leaving room for what we cannot fully know.

The title holds a question close. What does it mean to call someone "mine"? The same words can carry different meanings depending on how they are spoken, and what is done in their name. Here, they sit alongside questions of land, belonging, and possession, without neatly resolving them. What might love ask of us when the life we love is not ours to command?

This is a story of listening in the dark, of a voice on a hillside carried far beyond the place where it began. It invites us to stay with the difference between owning something, belonging with someone, and caring for a life we can never completely know.