ateolf | “An Arching Bouquet”

She was miserable and mad at the world, you know, the marrying kind. She filled her coffers with marriage magazines and the sundry, sumptuous things they recommended to her. Her drawers overflowed with cakes and lace and little bags of brown rice. After watching the news and turning off the television and feeling the venom course through her veins, she would take out one of the bags at random and count each grain. She was not expecting relief but resolution.
In the sky at night, each night, she senses a quiet storm above regardless of weather. The wind moved against the windowpanes and she knew it was time to prepare for her job at the hospital in the nightshift on the eighth floor.
The door closed behind her and she could see no bloom in the bushes though they were there. She would never learn of their presence, by the time she got home, her eyes were too bleary with exhaustion and light and wonder to notice. It was back to her drawers of rice and dreams of matrimony.
She opened one particular volume with her favorite particular passage. Within, it described a long path strewn with flowers, fresh air, and an arching bouquet outlining the sky. Birds descended upon the shoulders of the wedding couple, smiles reached across the aisle and found comfort at the other’s lips. She fell asleep with those pages across her lap or embracing her cheeks.
She never anticipated that one day, against all odds, against disappointments realized and maintained, her prince charming or some charming prince would descend from nowhere with no aim but to sweep her off her feet, into his arms, into a life of love and vows and bells and the limitless promise of the touch of someone else’s skin. We can’t fault her for this lack in hope, this failure to wed dreams with expectations, this failure to kneed wishes into wanting. We can’t fault her because this never did and never would happen. We can only join her by looking on in a wistful regret. We can admire her collection of bags of rice and periodicals and uneaten layers of cake. We can gaze in understanding, from afar, at the sneer baked in cathode light. And we’ll stay afar as we’d stay on this side of the fence at the zoo, pitying the emaciated tiger that just arrived, barely alive, soaked to the bone in pain and filthy water and a need to eat. This is her pain too, something like this.
She was miserable and mad at the world, you know. . . you know. . . Do you know? I am not sure I really do. I know enough to pretend I do. Regardless, please hold my hand and let us pretend here together.