Mary
I watch her as she goes, her head ducked low against the wind as she makes her way along the dunes, back to her inn, and her Michael. She’s in love, poor thing, though I don’t believe she’s ready to admit just how deeply. How I wish I could be happy for her, this lovely woman with the sad eyes and the heart that’s so much bigger than she knows.
But I cannot.
A woman’s heart is like a bit of porcelain, you see, a fragile thing, not to be handled roughly. But men are so careless, so clumsy. They cannot be trusted with delicate things. Like fine lace or a bird’s wing, wounds of the heart are rarely mended. But then, perhaps this Michael is one of the rare ones, a man who will stand firm when the ground beneath him begins to shift, and not let himself be swept away—a man who will stay. I used to believe in such men, long ago, in my own fairy-tale days.
Now as I watch her move away, my heart is heavy with the warnings I should have given but did not, about the dangers of being reckless with one’s heart, and what can happen when you make room for the ones who can’t stay. But it’s not really my place. I’m not her mother. I’m no one’s mother now, and no one’s wife. I’m no one’s anything. I was once, though, before the tide came in and the wreckage washed up.
We never dream we might lose those we love, because it’s too terrible, too inconceivable. They are simply the furniture of our lives, to be sidestepped, rearranged, and even stumbled over. Then one day they are simply gone, erased, and you’re left with only empty rooms and the echo of what once belonged to you. In that moment, that fraction of a second when your slate is wiped clean, there is the absolute certainty that none of it is true, that some error has been made, some hideous lie told, and that someday, somehow, it will all come right again. If you can only make them listen to the truth, the truth that you—and only you—know with your whole heart. But they don’t listen, and the rooms remain empty. And after a while your heart grinds to a halt, and you’re almost glad.
It’s a strange thing to know that you’re finally undone, to feel yourself at long last spooling free, that moment of terrible, wonderful freedom that comes when there’s nothing left to cling to, and you nearly weep with the relief of it.
And yet, beneath it all, the emptiness remains; the jagged place where love used to reside, where my princes reside still, has never fully closed. To lose one was a tragedy; to lose both was unspeakable. But no human frailty goes unpunished, or so the good nuns always told me, and my frailties are legion. And so I suppose my lost princes are my cross to bear, my bloodied crown of thorns, crucifixion without resurrection, sin without hope of redemption.
Through my fault.
Through my fault.
Through my most grievous fault.