Chapter Text
September 16, 1770
Dear sister,
Death never is a wholly welcomed guest.
The thing about them is that one cannot simply shut them out or skip them; if one life is saved, another one is taken hence why it’s called passing on.
Perhaps the same can be said to your fate which is now of course, mine. This fate that deprives us of freedom and selfdom—which like death, it does not end but is merely passed.
In death, you gained your freedom and in turn, sentenced me to lose mine. Yet in a true fashion of passing on, I wonder if you ever paused to ponder, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of life as a woman, that this freedom we both seek in this forsaken island is in fact the very same freedom that mother wishes to abandon and attain in Milan.
Oh the strange cycle of women’s penitentiary!
Your letter brought me mixed comfort and desolation. I cannot state the exact musings that thought it fitting to compose a response; for what purpose I do not yet know, perchance grief? Or perhaps to enlighten you of what came about the fate you have bequeath me with? For now, that is all I can do. I do not curse you nor hate you for your deliberate passings; I do, however, wish you have placed a greater confidence in me rather than confessing through a belated letter of apology.
With that said, I too, am sorry.
I cannot say I do not understand—things are not all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe. Shall I then say that I longed with an equal earnest and steadfast desire for the moment of my own calculated untimely demise? I did, perhaps still do; although presently this fragile spirit clings to its sullen tenement for many weeks and irksome moments until my tortured nerves mastered over my mind and grew furious in solitude like an oppressed raging sea.
You see, mother have little to no regard about passing moments and wasted no time in pressing on with her prospective arrangements. I very much doubt your remains frosted yet, but in any case, my very own imprisonment began at your very end, marooned to this incorrigible domicile. Since then, I have made up my mind—if freedom was not in my choice, then in defiance I shall secure it.
I will not have my person and my likeness captured and bartered off for someone else’s freedom.
I shall not be painted.
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