Rapunzel

((((This is to all of you))))
The same old stories can be told infinite times, and most people will assume that the morals have been leached from them, sucked out like the toxicity of lime when the rain turns it to limestone. It’s chaos theory, though. Even your breath changes the universe, somehow.

She grew so used to stone that the nerve endings in her fingers could not remember any other sensation. Perhaps stone was all they had known. She could not remember. The past, in its gaping negativity, was a door she dared not open. As barren and lonely as that room on the top of the castle was, it was all she knew. There is a curious thing about people and familiarity: people would rather embrace the horror they know than face the possibilities of an optimism they don’t.

And so she felt the stone.

The room was swept of all sentimentality. The floor had dust marks of decaying emotion. She stepped over the grimy streaks with light feet and a heavy chest. With every heartbeat, every tidal-wave of blood seeping into her lungs and purging her body, she felt guilt. She did not deserve the blood. She did not deserve the body. She deserved emptiness, apathy. She deserved a cleaning solvent breaking up the bonds of old emotion. She didn’t deserve to step over it every day.

Despite her knowledge that she was apart from it, or perhaps because of that knowledge, she was obsessed with life. She was obsessed with the red blood streaking her pale skin, dripping out with every contraction of cardiac muscle like the haze of tears she couldn’t cry. There was something liberating and exhilarating about knowing she possessed something she didn’t deserve. She tried to purge herself of it and failed; every connection with stone screamed life even while that disconnected part of her painted death in nervous brushstrokes.

In a corner, far from the rotting remains of feeling, a mirror stood, constantly on edge and prepared to shatter. It was a precipice she understood, that thin blade between wholeness and slivered existence. She felt a pull to the mirror, but she rarely looked in it. There was a crack in the upper corner that she knew her rawness had caused; it pulled apart into two separate, reflective tectonic plates. When she was younger she had sought out some sort of beauty, some sort of nourishment in piles of sticky flowers and dripping glass. Then, when she still cared about something other than herself, her face would appear in the mirror- delicate, stormy, but undeniable. Now, now that she has denied the world, denied all life, denied hope, there is nothing in the mirror. Even when she stands in front of it, it only reflects the stone of the room at the top of the castle.

She knows that when she was younger the door was locked. The heavy wood was lodged firmly into place by other inhabitants of the castle, the inhabitants that sustained her life with watery soup and dying flowers but never came in to touch her. Occasionally one would slam through the rotted beams of the door before she could stop them and plunge some icy weapon into her, and for days she would sit numbly in a corner, aware of nothing. They were always so eager to hurt her, so eager to prey upon her distraction if she did not watch the door one day.

Yes, when she was younger the door had been locked from the outside. She had had no real control over it. They had controlled everything; they had kept her alive only to hurt her, but it had been a sort of life she could value. Because she had to fight for life, she found a reason for it.

Now, years later, it has been ages since the inhabitants had a reason to keep her locked in the tower. She took up their mantle. The door is locked still, but now from the inside. Now it is her trying desperately to keep them out. Now that she has nobody to fight for her life she hordes it within her inexorable heartbeat.

There is a window. The window is another thing she never noticed when she was young. All of her focus, then, was on the door and speculation of escape. She noticed the window a few years ago. She had been so frightened of it’s openness after the first nightmare that she had fashioned bars to cover it. The ground was far below. Surely such a fall, taken without assistance, would kill even the immaterial parts of her. She barred the window for the same reason she locked the door. Now, the threat wasn’t the possibility of never escaping. Now, the threat was the possibility of somebody forcing her out of her safe isolation.

She remembers when she discovered the window, before she understood its danger, before she’d barred it with supports from her splintered bed. She had been humming one day, not a happy tune but some jagged creation of her own that tore her throat as it fled her larynx. At first she had heard only the comfortable, constant sounds of water dripping off of stone, a sort of harmony with her shattered hymn.

Then, slowly, she began to hear beyond her horrid humming the sound of a person singing. It drifted in through the window. It was beautiful, and new, and back then she had not been afraid. She dashed over to the cavity in the wall she had until that point not been aware of. She looked down and she saw a knight in shining armor. The steel of the carefully forged suit was the opposite of her abrasive stone; it was smooth, with healing powers. She forgot all of the broken places inside of her and worshiped the beauty of that kind of freedom.

The knight tilted his (or her, it doesn’t matter) helmet up towards the window in the high castle tower. The girl who knelt by it smiled. She felt a sort of wariness inside of her, but it wasn’t extreme enough to stop her from that small twitch of her lips.

“I will come up to you,” the knight said, his features distorted by the helmet, “I will come up to you and save you, and we will ride out of that castle and into a place where there are no castles, and no doors are locked.”

It had been such a wonderful promise, a promise full of all of the hope she had denied herself until that very moment.

“How?” she cried out. It was the first word she had spoken in years, besides the whimpers she had used to fight off the inhabitants of the castle.

“Just let your hair down,” the knight said, and the sun glinted in musical pools off his chest. The girl in the tower looked at her hair. She had not noticed it before. She had seen no need for it. But she had never cut it. It was long, and black, and strong, like the filaments in a spider’s web.

There was a moment when she hesitated. But this knight seemed so different from those that had hurt her. She fastened to this thought, gathered up her hair, and threw it down to the knight. The knight held to it with gauntleted fingers as she pulled him up to the stony room with the locked door.

She was so innocent then. She thought that if she locked the inhabitants of the castle out she could keep pain at bay, or at least pain caused by others. She had not thought to worry about the window.

The knight, in his armor, was very impressive, and for a while she was sure that he had come to save her from all of the horror in the world. She thought that he would never leave her, never hurt her. But one day she woke up and saw him slumped in a corner. He stood before the mirror. The reflection was not of a strong knight but of a blot of fading darkness, a blur much like her own reflection. Her knight tore off his armor then and there was a wraith underneath. That mass of hurting darkness had only the strength to pierce her heart before it tumbled out the window and fled to somewhere she could never reach it.

She had trusted the knight, and thus his betrayal felt maybe even worse than all of the betrayals of the inhabitants of the castle. She had thought that she could be saved.

After that she put the bars in the window. A few knights still passed by, but they saw the bars and shook their heads and left. She wasn’t worth the effort. Even more broken than before, the girl went back to the processes of withering away, of disappearing from the tangible world and into her own world of darkness. She hung a black sheet of cloth in front of the window, behind the bars. No one could see her. No one could break in. She was perfectly safe, all alone in her castle stronghold.

At night, though, she could not fool herself. She felt her burning isolation, so cold as to light her on fire, and she could not dismiss it like before, because now there was something to compare it to. Now, in memories that would not join those rotting streaks on the floor, she remembered feeling safe, remembered feeling like someone cared about her, someone was looking for her. The knight had hurt her, of course, more profoundly than she could ever explain. But he had left her with something legitimate; he had left her with an aching need she could never fill.

However, just when she was ready to shatter the mirror with the jagged rock of her anger- that balled up manifestation of all of her atonal hymns- a small crowd of knights gathered at the base of the castle and refused to leave. She tried ignoring them, and painting more parts of herself black to frighten them away. She tried dressing up like a being of light, to trick them into believing she had no need for their companionship. She tried frightening again them by dragging her black fingernails through her pale skin and drawing that fading life-force from her.

Through the days and months of their small congregation outside her window, no matter how much she tried to stop it, she felt herself loving them. She had always loved them all- the inhabitants of the castle, that first knight. Love wasn’t something she could lock and defend like her room in the castle. Love was something that her soul gave freely when she felt she had nothing left to give. Even when she had wanted nothing more than to disappear into the gap beyond the mirror, love had sent its tiny roots from her toes into the ground, and grew though she never watered it.

One day she woke up in the middle of the night. She heard them out there, sleeping but ready to jump up and save her. She walked quietly to the mirror, the spongy bits of love creating soft sandals to cushion her feet against the stone. For a moment there was that same old emptiness in the mirror, the absence of her existence. But then, in a flickering flash so brief she almost didn’t see it, she saw her reflection for the first time of years. She felt the stirring of the sprouts under her feet and she knew she was beginning to love that faded, imperfect duplication of herself.

There is no ending yet, no definable moral. There is the toxicity of lime as rain or tears turn it to stone. The poison is fading. Perhaps the story is arbitrary, random. Perhaps you do not know this girl. Perhaps she does not exist.

But every night she looks down at you just outside her castle window, and every night though you may not notice she cuts one wooden bar in two.

She sits on the bed and wonders what you think of why she won’t let you in. She worries that you think it is because she’s convinced you’ll hurt her, like that first knight long ago. That is not it, really. That may be part of it, but it is more than that.

She could tell right away that you were wearing a good kind of armor. You are not wearing it to keep just yourself safe; you wear it also to protect others. It is not something you are confined to, though. You can take it off any time you want to bathe in the sun.

So what is she afraid of? I’ll tell you what I believe, though it may not end the story. I believe she is afraid that you will show her to the mirror, and that when she looks into it she will see a suit of armor like that of the first knight, fake with a wraith within. Yes, you know, that would destroy her world.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it? More than that fear (which we can’t deny is within her), there is a greater fear, harder to pin down, as fleeting as her reflection in the night. What she is most afraid of isn’t something you can help her fight; it is something she would be left alone to handle.

What she is most afraid of is that you will show her to the mirror, and when she looks into it she will see something beautiful, something worth loving.

Yes, you know, that might save her life.