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0.
It's not something her mother can heal.
1.
Desire is no light thing, Isabela knows. Still, she holds a terrible desire to be loved for the uneven thorns inside of her—it's a desire with no future, a bitter longing. She starves herself by yearning for an intimacy that doesn't and won't exist.
2.
Their eyes meet as they dance, and when the night is over, she’s in Isabela’s bed, kissing salvation against her skin, licking divinity from her lips.
She carved her hips into Isabela, like she were Michelangelo and Isabela was becoming something holy.
3.
The sun arches across her bare hip, curving into her waist, the sheets falling against supple flesh, a halo against the forbidden. Is it desire, or love that she's feeling?
The thing about suffering is that it feels religious if you do it right. Hating yourself can become holy if you make it into a ritual, white-knuckling the sink every morning as you can barely look at your own face as you try to picture him—anyone other than her, your childishness screams—caressing it.
Why does it feel like you don’t own yourself? It’s your body, right? It’s your choice, right?
Right?
When all of her heart screams the same thing (this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, I don’t end here, I don’t want to live this life, I want nothing to do with this, I just want to run away) the world, with its gnarled hand, holds her by the throat and in a scratchy, echoing voice answers: but that’s how it is.
4.
One night, pillowed by darkness, Isabela drinks too much and thinks she says something stupid like I love you or sometimes I think about what would happen if I ran away, I think about Tio Bruno and I can’t help but miss him because he made me laugh but I wonder whether he’s happier.
She sighs in that way she does when Isabela says something that she doesn’t like, and she supports Isabela all the way to the steps of Casa Madrigal, where she settles Isabela on the steps and drops to her knees, cupping Isabela’s face in her strong palms.
“I don’t know whether it’s smart that we keep seeing each other,” she says. Isabela’s eyes cloud with tears that she doesn’t have the presence of mind to wipe away, because she’s ruined everything by saying it out loud, no, she can’t lose her, she doesn’t know how she can marry a man she doesn’t love if she’s—
Alone.
She dries Isabela’s tears with her fingertips, dancing across the fragile skin as she pouts. “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” she breathes, her lips glimmering in the moonlight, “I just don’t know if this is healthy, because you don’t—”
“—Want me.”
The only thing Isabela’s sure happened that night is that she kissed her. She gripped her face and brought her lips to hers before she could tell herself no, and she kissed her on the steps of her familial home, knowing fully what would happen if someone had opened the door.
5.
It’s not allowed.
If anyone finds out, she’s dead.
She’s ruined.
She’s seen what happens.
The town is looking for a new scapegoat, and she knows that she’s sauntering vaguely downwards.
They make out in the stairwell of an overgrown church, gilt steeple above. The laughter's hidden in her lips, and Isabela's hands are in her hair.
She knows there's angels singing with voices like her Mama's, up there somewhere, and she hopes that despite everything, they're singing for them and the blood and all the places where their thighs touch and how it makes the gold in her veins surge, where their shivering, terrified bodies melt into shared, primal heat.
On the cold air, their breaths sing hymns to ghosts, the gravity of hearts.
6.
The enormity of her desire disgusts her. She washes her hands until they crack and bleed, spins and twirls and arches her feet—performing, dancing, her feet never leaving the stage, her eyes never leaving the prize, until they fold over, like a house of Abuela’s cards, and she collapses.
She’s watching her from the corner, arms folded and leaning on one leg. She’s smirking, as if daring Isabela to cut the act in front of everybody. Instead, Isabela giggles daintily and hands Father del Rosa a blooming pot of roses. Thornless.
Wouldn’t draw blood if you tried.
7.
She's standing at the kitchen sink this time, crying, because she doesn't know what to do with this life that makes her feel like she's the last girl in the world, dragging around the corpse of everything she's ever wanted, because she's killed the dream by living it too much.
8.
She’s sitting on the side of her bed and Isabela’s pacing a hole in her carpet. She doesn’t say anything, just swings her legs back and forth, eighteen and on the cusp of greatness.
“If I relaxed my body now, I think I'd fall apart, simple as that. I've always lived like this and it's the only way I know how to live. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back to where I need to be. I'd fall from the pedestal I know I don't deserve but have to stay on. I'd shatter into tiny pieces, and the pieces would be blown away into nothing. Why can't you see that? Why are you acting like we have any future outside of these walls? Why are you acting like you could love me when you know I can't?! Is your cruelty that vast?!”
She growls, stalks back towards the door like a wounded predator and runs home on bare feet. When she collapses in her room, headfirst into a pile of thornless, perfect roses, her feet are covered in tiny cuts and staining everything with pinpricks of hurt.
She finds that she likes it.
9.
It doesn’t surprise anyone when Encanto’s village becomes one resident smaller, and Isabela feels the strange, sudden urge to hold onto every scrap that she knows will be taken away from her. The grief is hers alone to carry, the loss that she’s not sure whether it’s her right to feel.
She drove a girl away from her family. She didn’t.
She said she wanted to leave. She seemed happy. She was bouncing up and down, curls caressed by the wind, when she’d gotten the letter that confirmed the university accepting her and taking a mallet to Isabela. She smiled as she crumbled into dust, tears spilling silently, filling a river, watering the jungle, drowning foolish girls.
10.
She receives a letter that she never opens.
She knows it’s over. She doesn’t need her closure. She doesn’t need to be treated like another errand from a past life to handle—to wrap up before everything new kicks off. She doesn’t want to answer it. She knows she’s just a wrinkle in her life by now, just a brief side note at the bottom of the page—even if all she wants to do is reach across the sea that Isabela put there, that Isabela insisted on because she flinches every time someone gets close.
She burns the letter outside, sitting on the porch.
It’s over. It’s over. She has to be Mariano Guzmán’s wife now. She has to cook, she has to clean, she has to bear children and she doesn’t want it, she wants anything else, she wants to be the one driven away. She drove away a girl who laughed at the market, who juggled fruits for kids—she drove away someone who wanted to stay because she was too afraid to even stick her toe in the water.
It’s there that Isabela resolves herself to not being someone who’s allowed to love, and that night, she writes a letter that she addresses to the fire.
11.
She did not want to think about people. She wanted the grass under her bare toes, she wanted the trees, their scents and colours curling against her gaze, the shifting shadows of the wood, beckoning to climb it in a way she's never been allowed, the curve of the roots speaking a language she's always been fluent in, but unable to speak.
She wished she could disappear into it, live like a toucan or the jaguar tailing it, and leave the things she'd lived to resolve themselves without her.
12.
Everything’s supposed to be better now.
What a load of horseshit.
Everything’s not.
She’s staring down Abuela in the kitchen, in the middle of the dark, a knife in her hand and she finally says it, her tongue curling into a snarl, “Fuck you,” she growls, “The good news is that I survived knowing you, the bad news is that you were something I had to survive.”
13.
Isabela is forever chained to herself; that's what she is, that's how she's going to die and that's what she must try to live with, because the miracle must go on. But sometimes, just sometimes, in front of the mirror, she entertains the thought of tearing her face in two just to see what would happen.
When she dies, she hopes her desire is buried with her. Staring out at the flowering sky, she wonders whether it would sprout into a tall, winding tree, whether it would bear fruit—and who would taste her in it?