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She gave me a sad look. “Of course you’ll carry on,” she said with certainty.
And of course, I did. I had no other choice, after all.
And I didn’t have a choice with Keltan either.
It was Wednesday. Which meant a deadline for my now regular column at Covet. And then it was wine time, with Rosie coming to pick me up. Healthy habits, denial and wine, to get me through.
I stared at my keyboard, the empty space where the words should go taunting me. Taunting me with the reality that a writer, any kind of writer, only sees when the page is empty. Because without the words to fill up our pages, our thoughts were free to confront us with what the words distracted us from.
Reality.
I couldn’t let a man consume me like this.
I couldn’t lose myself.
I couldn’t drown in this.
But I couldn’t breathe without it.
It was insanity. I knew that. The blank page was telling me exactly that.
My head snapped like a rubber band, in that way that it did when the words came. And then I wasn’t looking at a blank page anymore. In fact, I wasn’t looking at anything anymore.
I was in the place where my fingers danced across a keyboard, like that’s where my brain was instead of my head.
Royalty
Princesses.
They are real, of course. Grace Kelly. Diana. Kate.
Audrey Hepburn.
Okay, she technically doesn’t have blue blood, or a crown, but everyone can agree that she is royalty. Plus, haven’t we all seen Roman Holiday?
All iconic, real-life versions of women who embodied the image that Disney has made so darn romantic.
It isn’t the unrealistic expectations of men that have damaged women so much. We aren’t stupid; we quickly see the lack of men on shiny steeds and are educated on the assholes that make up an alarming percentage of the fairer sex.
Mostly we see that princes are not all they’re cracked up to be.
To be a princess as a girl is encouraged. Dress-up gowns made of the most flammable polyester that I worry about young girls being near a flickering candle while dancing around with a plastic crown atop their head and dreams in their mind.
Here’s a secret. We may ditch the polyester (thank GOD) as we turn into women, but a frightful amount of us are still wearing that plastic crown—albeit in our own imagination.
No matter how much we consider ourselves feminists, how independent we can be, how many more opportunities we have to make ourselves into something more than a girl in a polyester dress waiting for a man in tights to come and save us—we still are. Versions of it, for sure, but give a woman an opportunity to be a princess, and I’d wager she’d take it.
Because that’s the secret. Society wants us to be princesses. Not so we can wear pretty dresses and look nice, but so the bigwigs can sell movie tickets. So those plastic crowns keep them in the black.
It’s encouraged to wait for a prince to save us.
But what if we don’t want the title of princess? Despite what the current reigning monarch of England is communicating, we still haven’t gotten it. We don’t have to be princesses.
We can be queens.
We don’t need a crown for that.
Nor do we need polyester dresses.
Or dresses at all.
Or pastels.
*Sits here typing this in black leather pants, the whole outfit as black as my royal heart*
I’m part of a family that is a different kind of royalty, but the feudal system is still present. So is the idea that a woman can’t rule. Well, at least that’s what they want you to think. I’m lucky enough to have seen firsthand that women can be queens. They might need to be saved every now and then, but most of the time they’re the ones doing the saving, without even knowing it.
Just some food for thought.
You don’t need a man, or a crown, or a dress to be a princess.
Why be princess when you can be queen?
“I’m here.”
I closed the door to my house and stared at the empty cul-de-sac, apart from Mrs. Hesten chopping her roses. She glanced up through the sun, using her hands above her brow to stop her squinting. She gave my tight black skirt a disapproving look, despite the fact that it reached my knees.
I waved.
She nodded tersely back, then went back to her roses.
I focused my attention on the empty, well-kept street, still slumbering in its afternoon nap.
“You’re not here. I’m here. Here being on the street where your car would be, and I do not see it,” I replied, my heels clicking on my cobbled walk as I unlatched the gate to lean against it. I should have a chair put out here; the amount of times Rosie did this was ridiculous.
“I am here, you just can’t see me,” she protested. Though her mouth was muffled in such a way that I pictured her hastily applying lipstick while speeding through the—thankfully—abandoned streets of Amber.
