a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
D
anaë had not known what it was to feel adrift. She was made both a twin and a unicorn. Her organs were made to beat the same tune as another’s. The horn on her head was made to twist and spiral into the world so that even that piece of her might be filled up with something (someone) else. Even the magic in her blood does not beat, and throb, and roar in a way that belongs to her. Each of her pieces, frail and marble-hard, had been made to fit into something else.
But today, as the dawn rises in shades of gold and lilac, she discovers what it feels like to look at the world and feel as lost as a blue jay buried in the rings of a maple tree. Her magic trills at the feel of her father approaching like a dead songbird begging for the leaves of a forest in the spring instead of a throat full of worms. It feels like all her insides no longer want to belong to her, to a unicorn who dreams in eulogies of the woods instead of meadows with flowers teasing the curl of her ribcage. Even the garden, where moss and mushrooms grow in the stones around her, feels like it is fighting against the passing of Ipomoea’s reign.
Danaë has always known the gardens will not love her, cannot love her, when she must chew out every root and bloom to grow anything of her own.
She had believed that she could understand the hate of the garden, could learn to love it enough that a one sided love was stronger than any two-sided thing. But when the dawn halos her father’s crown of flowers (one that she has never been able to weave around her horn) that belief slips away like a dandelion seed in a summer rain-storm. It is too wet, too stuck in the mire, to dream of becoming even a weed yellow as a dawn sun.
Like it is war instead of comfort she charges into her father’s touch. She leans into him like he is the sole anchor, and the garden that she’s begging to love her, and the weight of the crown she does not feel ready to bear. His skin is warm and full of life against the death-chill of her own. Below her ear, when she lays it against his throat, she can hear a swarm of honeybees, a forest full of songbirds, the whisper of a caterpillar weaving a chrysalis around itself. Each note, each echo of life, creates another divide in the pieces of her looking for something to fit into.
“I do not know how to be anything at all to the morning.” She whispers against his cheek and even that marble-dust piece of her seems like nothing more than pollen falling to sea instead of bloom. She floats there, in the tide of her lostness, as a shard of watered down gold. The magic in her chest grows another pile of moss, pale and brown like it’s winter racing towards them in the wind instead of a perfect summer day. “But I will try because you have asked it of me.” Because the garden didn’t ask her, the forest did not ask her, the willow-tree that moans against her window did not ask her.
Only the dead, the foxes and wolves and wendigos, ask anything of her at all. A garden does not need her as they do, a garden will never love her as the corpses and the rot does.
The music hums louder around them, loud enough that she cannot hear the honeybees of her father’s blood when she pulls away from him. All she can hear is the heavy rain of her heart because even her sorrow must sound like something else. Her hooves sound like stone, like blades, like the whisper of a scythe dragged through the heads of wheat, as she moves towards the music like a ghost-ship straining for a shoreline shrouded in fog. The garden does not sing, in notes of petals and roots, a hallelujah for her when she passes through the rust and ivy gates of it.
But it sings for Ipomoea and it is all she can hear outside the music and the headless wheat sound of her movement towards a coronation.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
« r » | @Ipomoea
