Ever-After Endings
She wanders down the long, gilded hallways, the tips of her calloused fingertips tracing the carved walls. She is alone in a crowd of bustling and frantic activity. Quiet and peace is longed after, but not found within the confines of the palace. Everyone is busy, cleaning tapestries and washing floors. White noise filling the large space. The hurried clinks of shoes along the marble ground.
He is in her mind, plaguing her thoughts. The feel of his lips on her skin, the sound of his voice in her ear. She struggles to break free from the building desire that he has sparked, that she desperately tries to extinguish. She pushes it to the back of her mind, already overflowing with wants and needs to adventure, to explore. Already towering with abandoned skills of fighting and climbing, agility and innovation. She has replaced her agility for flawless posture, her sword-fighting for needle and thread work, her cleverness for articulation diction. But they sit there, gathering dust, bulging at the seams of her brain, throbbing for liberation. And so she meanders aimlessly through the bright foyers of the kingdom. Reminding herself time and again that this is what she wants.
When she sees him directing servants and addressing citizens, showing love and duty, her heart skips a beat. He is as immaculate as always, flawless in his movements, his speech. He presents her with flowers, showers her with carefully chosen words praising beauty and elegance. Crafted and perfected. He offers his arm and she takes it gladly, the velvet of his shirt brushing against her skin reminding her of something else, of someone else.
As they walk in the gardens; a ritual for them now, she batts away the little nagging voice inside her head, the one that tells her they are only that. Fashioned phrases that belong in a story, actions that follow a narrative. She pushes aside the slight discomfort she has begun to feel, the doubt about her choices. The feeling of mundane familiarity that has begun to percolate the newly constructed edifice of her life, snaking into the cracks of her judiciously structured walls. She shakes off the feeling that there is more than the whimsies and ardour that it is her love life.
This is after all, her happily ever after. Her fairy tale ending.
