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Because I sleep, there is summer.
Summer is the moment held by the energy of the in-between. It is suspension in abundance. A breath you caught. Feet that lift off the ground.
Stillness ripples through my castle, in a silence that drifts. Flames in the hearth not flickering, curtains not fluttering. Only the roses grow. My vision ends where their thicket begins. Brambles of thorns tighten and strangle, like a forest of cobwebs and with thick black spiders entangling their prey, kissing it dry.
The part of me that knows how to move does just that. I have always been strongest at breaking through the preconceptions of what I can and should do. These days, I succeed with small things. An empty crib that rocks and creaks. The spin of a wheel. Listen to the music I compose.
From the wall, next to the staring kitchen boy, I pick up a fly. What a futile expenditure of mental strength. There is no tickling of little legs, no buzzing. All their tiny souls are frozen like mine, for otherwise I would have eaten them long ago.
I have no companions but for my dreams.
My people. Even though you must hate me, I long for you. Caressing your waxen faces, I wonder if one can hate when asleep.
Is it a sin? My desire to be alive? Did not my mother sin when she made me?
I barely survived the storms of my spring, fickle thing that I was, a conspiracy of love and pain and magic. The winds almost swept me away, but I fought to stay. Because of my people, because of those who had loved me once.
It was on the cusp of summer when he killed me.
"I had no idea," he had said, turning pale and sweaty.
I loved him, but I wasn't made for this kind of thing. All my boundaries, those I had drawn up against the other side, crumbled, collapsed. When I saw a wild rose blossoming nearby, I took its soul to steady mine. Witnessing it wither, he recoiled from me. I remember screaming. Then I got ripped apart by the vortex inside of me.
My godmother sleeps near to where I lie, drab and cold as stone. This tomb of all that is my fault – I shy away from it. I am the one who should not have been. She is the one who bent fate to my mother's wishes. Time and again I pondered the why, but in the end I come to the same conclusion.
All the things we do to each other?
We do them for each other. For we are caught in the web of strings that bind us, and that pull us in different directions. Love and self-love, faith and responsibility and that which is a contradiction in itself: free will. The words whispered when the holy water touched my forehead were a blessing and a curse.
I should die on my sixteenth birthday, and yes, he killed me when it was time.
But she wouldn’t let me go.
Oh godmother, my creator, my sage. What a stubborn fool you were. You, who drew me from the other side with your thread tightly spun around your queen, you never agreed with what should have been. Perhaps in this, most of all, I am yours. I should have ended there and then; instead you froze us all where we stood: roses and spinning wheels, spiders and servants and the sun overhead.
You froze your king and even my mother, your beloved queen.
Predicted never to live through summer, I sleep through it now. In my dreams I hunger for life. I build up my music and with it I call my yearning out into the world. My summer is a trapped breath, a living on air borrowed from the inhale. When the time comes, I will breathe out. My feet will touch the ground, ready for the next step.
Listen, my people: your princess will rise again, to redeem every minute, every second she has taken!
Those who heed my plea dangle on thorns.
But every now and then a single soul succeeds. A prince or a washerwoman, to me it matters not. My motionless body awaits their kiss, my soul awaits theirs.
It is no sin to want to live.
Their dry shells tumble to the floor. Their souls feed mine.
I do not stir.
Not yet, but soon.
Summer will end.