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I was never one for poetry.
It was easy for me to find unnamed feelings in the sun streaming through stained glass in the mornings, glazing the castle walls in vibrant lights. things I felt deep in my chest I left unspoken. Grassy plains and summertime in Hyrule held an wordless beauty, a type that dug under your skin and made you shiver despite the heat. I have felt great sorrow and pain, great joy and triumph, and uttered little of it. I speak very little at all, really.
But recently, I've been searching for this, something. Grasping blindly for some phrase like a child who doesn't know the word for please. For the first time in my life, I want to speak so badly I ache. Whispering a thought, letting the words spill out of me faster than drying ink, I want to speak. Pining day after day for a name to the feeling in my soul.
But I just can't find the words.
Every morning I wake up to the same sight.
Blonde hair and a blue shirt, five feet away in a wooden cot. She houses bony elbows and bitter scowls, and great sadness that she's shut away behind her ribs. She speaks in a cold and closed tone, regal, and every day her words bite at my ankles. She's particular and obstinate and quite frankly Infuriating and watching her rise is like watching the sun crest over the horizon when you thought that the night would last forever.
She fills my silence with words I sometimes don't understand, ideas she'd found in the back pages of an old book. A mind like that needs someone who likes to listen, and I don't mind, I love her voice. She talks and I work, or we walk or ride and explore and the void I had found in my life was somehow filled to the brim with this excitement, and it fit like a glove. When I awoke all those moons ago, I hadn't realized there was a hole in me the size of her heart. And now it's there, and I feel… full.
She likes to do dangerous things, which I find quite stupid for someone who prides themselves on being smart. I suppose I am added security, she knows I'll always be there to watch her back– But it still makes my heart race. Collecting guardian parts, stumbling across lynels– I'm in better shape now than I was when I Fought the calamity. She commented on that once. Something about an impressive Hylian anatomy based on something or other and I think about it quite often and it makes me quite often flustered. I've been flustered a lot recently, really. Her scowls and sharp words seem to worm their way through me easily nowadays, taking up a large part of my thoughts. And then there's that funny feeling again, burning up from my chest into my head.
It's dizzying.
She was always more of a scholar than a princess, at least in my opinion. Princesses are elegant and polite. A distant and proper relic of power. Their nose in the air, dainty, demure, that sort-- She's nothing like that.
She walks flat-footed and yells in my ear, stumbling through forests and riverbeds with brash and excited movements. The goddess is wide-eyed at the new world and though she's not very funny it's not for lack of trying, her jokes are just 100 years too old.
She knows this, and does not care.
I think I may love her.
That idea has raked through my chest more times than I can count. It makes my hand lighter as it holds the blessed sword, it makes every choice more calculated. The idea that I may love her haunts me in the way a soldier fights to go home. She is who I raise my shield for, and whose grim I keep close to my chest at night.
But I am only this sword and this shield.
I don’t know if underneath this skin is a human or a hollow space, filled with the purpose someone else gave me eons ago. If I had only been born just a boy, and she just a girl, I wonder if it would have been different. I think about it too often to be good for me. How would I ever tell her how I feel, when I am not even sure if the feeling is fully mine?
I’d like to think that I’m acting of my own accord, and I like to ignore the idea that all of my actions have been predetermined; painted on murals and stitched into quilts by people who died long before I was born. Am I free to choose her, or has that been decided as well?
Sometimes I think about it in the afternoon, when we sit in the sunlight next to the ledge by the apple orchard. She sits with a knee up, hunched over a book or tightening the screw on an old machine part. The sun is warm and gold and the grass is yellow underneath us. I lay, flicking my gaze from her to the tanning sky. In those moments I don’t think it matters if our paths were charted by legends or gods. In a million lifetimes, I would have chosen her anyways.