Call it excitement, but beneath my dress, my mother cinched two ribbons of my corset with the same ferocity of someone trying to confine a woman with a rope. Naturally, my ribs tried to field the restraints, bending at uncanny angles, this way and that, until my lungs were compelled to shrivel up like raisins forgoing all oxygen. My mother’s eyes met mine in the peer glass when her voice ran sharp. “Darling, it suits you wholly well”, my mother said. “But remember my sweet girl, should I suppose a hero you should meet, dare I warn you child, they’ll steal your breath and your heart .” In the mirror I studied myself. My chestnut hair looped in several curls, pinned perfectly aback by pearl clips, looked all too much like cement logs piled uncannily on ship docks. If my cheeks were painted with another swipe of rouge or my eyelids with a glossy finish of sparkles, I’d surmise my mother was trying to paint something I was not. Precisely a piece of her handiwork, I was a drawn girl of my mother’s dreams. Although, devastation was written across my face, pale as a page, beneath it all. Later would the clock strike midnight and the church bells ring doom for me and my story and unsuspectingly, I would abandon the white gloves I donned. But now, I slid them through my ten fingers and wiggled the sheer fabric to the seam of my elbow and forearm until my skin was nothing more than a memory.
My silver gown was fastened by my mother. A scrap of fallen starlight which puddled off my shoulders in sagging cap sleeves and gleaming languid streams of tulle. The Milky Way it seemed was at my feet serving as a mass of constellations and stories all stitched together for me to wear. Albeit, I’ve come to know, some constellations had yet to be discovered by astronomers which left me to believe there were some stories unwritten and infinite. At once, the dress was zipped and the luxury of a breath was officially stripped from me as I choked out, “Mother, undo this dress. Now, if you may. I cannot breathe through all the confinements.” After eighteen blighted years, my breath was no more easily won over than it ever had been. I had been running from the end of my story the day I was born and yet, my lungs could never quite capture enough breath to withstand any other route.
Here I was, walking along the pave to a manor in which might just obtain my future wedding ring, tucked away in a pocket of another male, perhaps placed there by my very own mother. He would go on to assume the position of just another male, insipid and dutiful, but with distasteful assurance, a prince.
The grand building was tucked away behind groves of willows weeping white flowers like pale freckles on the lawn. And inside the checkered marble foyer was empty save for a slew of knights shining in obtrusive gold armor. They held swords at ready and each step, as I made my way down, the faceless guards offered a slight nod. Companion to their reception, notes, fluid and ascending, greeted my ears. Alongside the distant din of chatter and glasses clinking, I strained to hear a servant who awaited my hand and questioned my name. Only I grinned, uncouth as my rigid face only granted a crooked smile not far from indolent. It was just that anxiety was tying knots in each of my muscles, one by one, cording them into a tight braided mess of futility.
Into the ballroom we finally reached, and male after male, I studied the inhabitants of the symposium. Without crowns, or perhaps capes and doublets, the men whom flitted about the room in their finery couldn’t save a princess from devastation if they tried. Men were flaunting about women on chaises. Some were eyeing me over their champagne glasses, no doubt taking notice to the structured cement rollers of my pinned curls. Or perhaps the restraining vise around my chest, halting each of my breaths while the men deliberately looked and calculated how many they could thieve. The sounds of my steps had been swallowed up and the first glass of champagne I accosted had properly slaked any wanton thirst for escaping. Perhaps, I thought as the expensive bubbles exploded over my tongue, the beguiling demeanor of liquor and its sense of eternal mirth, would simply erase the silhouette of my story. Maybe it would slip through the cracks of these marbled floors and venture along to another passage.
Well past midnight….
In my profuse attempts at scrawling a penned letter, perhaps with all my might, or with utter frustration at its menial requirements, my mind began to reel like the hands of an unflagging clock. Hunched over a wooden desk with a lone cream candle lit and melting, my heart beats cried out with the sounds of the midnight’s tireless and ringing bell. My hand worked faster and the bell’s rings ascended every minute, frustratingly galvanizing my words into sloppy scrawl.
I felt as if I were in a hundred stories and couldn’t read hastily enough to reach the end. Love stories, tragedies, stories that had yet to be compelling me to forge my own. And yet, my fingers couldn’t keep pace with my thoughts, more fervently, my thoughts couldn’t keep up with the multitude of moments at bay. The waters were eager to release themselves into the shores of my sand colored paper. My hand had become the moon controlling currents but the shores came up dry under the light of my missing memories. My vanishing end.
Call it daftness or lack of a pragmatic paragon, I found myself looking for details held in dust motes flitting about the air, or in the craters of the moon which grinned mischievously through my window should I seek the end of my story there. Against the chill of my window, I even rested my forehead, curiosity an uncogent force when I too hoped I had scribbled my story over the perspiration. I knew my hair was artfully mussed by the hands of someone. Someone whom I recall looking at me the way you weren’t supposed to look at someone. The way words seemed to write themselves in irises of blue and overindulgent gazes. It was the unabashed way which made my heart stumble, trip, and somersault within my chest because he had the words my story could never find. But that ever-after eluded me now, and desperately, cynically, I wished I could remember how to swim. If I could dive into their icy blue depths and discover the long lost treasure I had been searching for, I would be the richest woman bathing in a fairytale. But first, I would wash the blood from my feet and then await fate to take my hand once more.
Months later or so later…
Thus far, I had been motionless, supine on a four poster bed, watching the wind ripple through gauzy curtains, and awaiting for a ripple in time to carry me backwards. That night, to my most exaltation and so many evenings gone, the memories now blurred. But I picked up a feathered pen, crusted to the tip with black ink, dry as my story’s end, and eyed the drunken scrawl of where my story sat pending:
“I was prepared to feel the chill of the air. Ready for night’s grasp to take my hand and pull me into darkness. But I was not prepared to find my hand accompanied by something warmer and leading me through the front doors of the manor. The willows had now halted their weeping and brooked a path along a river’s bed for my heels to await my return as I had discarded them in the darkness. Together, we fled the party. We fled from the portrait of a future my mother had chalked up to the very architectural frames. My bare feet carried me through the forest and cobbled streets. Storefronts with lights switched off passed us by. And then pocketed homes bearing orange flickers of bleeding candlelight who peered prudently at us as if we were a secret, a lost page in time.
Freedom had never tasted so illicit and blissful on my tongue. It was no less than royal silk on my bereft lips and featherlight touches on my hips. It was the sensation of music swallowed up by the sounds of distant laughter and remnants of glasses clinking as the party goers had begun to forfeit their senses to liquor. My bones had never felt so full and paradoxically weightless as they tottered along the margins of this hazy fairytale. Down the streets painted in gilt light, dreamily dripping from street lamps and candles, I could sense my undone hair flying like a proud flag of chestnut and surrendering its fetters of clips and pomp. My feet wove through the dividing edge of the sidewalk and the street, daring to walk another path and hesitant to leave the safer former. But together, we ran through the streets and from the feigned words of prophecies, the vain chatter of individuals desperate for a page in my heartbreak. Our sullied steps made marks on the grass, the stones and the bricks. Our breaths falling from our mouths, puffing with white plumes, carved their marks in the air. And when we finally settled along a column of cold marble, wrapped in the chill of night, he looked at me the way someone was not supposed to as the bells tolled like a procession to midnight. He told me to trust the danger of my bare fingers, capable of writing, as he stripped the gloves from my ten fingers. To paint my own picture as he slid the pad of his thumb across the apple of my cheek. My mother’s paint smeared and unraveled to a masterpiece in lieu. The make up slipped from my skin and uncovered beneath it all was a memory I had forgotten was there. Beneath it all was me and the story unwritten. I sighed hesitantly, signing my name in the unfamiliar air and naming this moment the ever-after of my tale. And it had felt like a million stories. Love stories written in the surreptitious escape. Tragedies in the memory of my mother’s long lost directional drawings. And stories unwritten as he spun me round, turning over the next blank page, and kissed me with his lips. My gown fell in broken shards of that starlight, twinkling among the cobble stones, as if to tell me that those stories written in the stars were never truly mine to bear. Beautiful and heartbreaking, shattering, and reshaping, my novel turned into wildly something else.
“Tell me something,” he huffed, just as reassuringly out of breath I was. And I had to loosen my fastened eyes from his gaze, tear them away, until I could think without being swallowed up in his full of hope ever-after gaze. I stared at the ground and my bare feet until the breath between my words came easier, but the reality of them did not. “In fairytales, wine will make you dance until your feet bleed”. Because my feet scarred with fresh wounds stained the cobbled street with blood, spilling ruby bright and molasses thick. It was the lurid color of my fairytale coming alive. It was the corroboration that perhaps fairy tales did exist and I had just danced, ran, and kissed my way into a magical tale. Behind I left the restraints of my old one. My shoes on the river bed. My pearl fasteners on the road. And stepping over my forsaken starlight dress and white gloves, I could finally breathe.”
I looked back at my bed, admiring the male who’s steady breath rumbled the room between his snores. Deviously fashioned and loose over his forehead hung a short heap of sleep mussed curls and I smiled. Day by day, page after page, our fairytale was falling into step. It was hard not to run towards it again because my mother was crassly wrong. Well partially, because this hero hadn’t stolen my breath at all, instead he stole my heart and insisted on giving me his.