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Maybe it goes like this: you are a witch in the woods. You’ve got your life mapped out, here on the riverbank; your tidy cottage, its thatched roof, the drying herbs hung from its beams, dancing in motes of sunlight. The willows sway in the breeze, your cat twines around your ankles, all soft purrs and softer fur lining your skirts, and life is perfect.
And then the river brings him around your bend, and nothing is ever the same. He washes up on your shore, a wounded hero in a little boat, and what can you do but tug him from its confines? What can you do but tend to his hurts, soothe his nightmares, ease his pain with willow bark and a warm touch? Eventually, he wakes, and murmurs thanks, fever broken. Eventually, he sits up and tells you jokes, winks at you as you go about your work, pets your cat, sitting in his lap like a traitor. Eventually, he tells you stories of the wider world, wonders you’ve not known.
And when he offers his hand, you take it.
The willow gives you one last gift: reeds to weave into a basket, and with your cat on your back, the three of you leave the riverbend.
You will not look back.
*
Or maybe it’s different. You’re twenty-one years old in a wool coat and leather brogues, hair in a perfect wave and just the right shade coating the lip caught between your teeth, because you feel you might come out of your skin at any moment.
The train sways and you move with it, a dance that makes you feel ill, because his overnight bag moves too, the neck of the champagne bottle glinting, and you know. You can’t help but know why his hand keeps seeking his pocket, why his smile comes and goes like a flash of sunlight, tentative. Why the empty chatter of your school friends you use to fill in the silence garners distracted, nonsensical responses, and you want to be anywhere else on earth with an all-consuming desperation.
Don’t, you want to tell him. Please don’t spoil everything. But that wouldn’t be fair, would it? It’s you who will spoil everything, you who’ll get the blame.
You whose mind has been made up for far too long, letting this linger on the edge.
And now you know your answer.
*
Consider this: You are in love with a mirage.
Just for a moment, mind. One of those empty moments when your mind drifts, hands wrapped around your cup like it’s the delicate bones of that pretty face, like the warmth comes from skin, the porcelain smooth as that thick fall of hair.
As though your lips might part for an argument instead of a sip, or at least a discussion, a debate that would find its end in laughter and kisses, in sunset walks along the shoreline. Like the laundry tossed over your chair might belong to someone else, someone with élan and polish, casual poise and all the mystery inherent in a raised eyebrow, tempting you on.
But your life isn’t rose-colored any more than the glasses you nudge back up your nose with a sigh, setting down your phone.
Safe and sound, that’s you, through and through.
*
Or it might be this way: time to do battle with nostalgia, your old enemy.
It waits for you with the teeth of winter frost and the claws of childhood bonds, digging into your skin like old friends. Like the sight of her truck, pulling up beside you as you walk down the same old sidewalks to the store; the lazy call of hey, stranger from the window, a pied piper leading you to ruin again.
And you’ll go, every damn time. What else have you got to do?
She never asks for anything. That’s not her way. Never comments on the changes to your face, or the sharper angles of your body, just kisses the bones jutting a little more prominent from your wrists more tenderly, like she knows it won’t do any good to try. Like she knows this is all she’ll be allowed, this liminal space here in the cold winter light, her heat turned up too high and the air too dry, and none of it matters at all.
Maybe this is what your life could have been, once. It never will be again.
*
Once, this will be the truth: an overwhelming tide rising inside you, all that love and lust and confused longing to be just so, to be just right.
You’re here because he wanted you; or no, that’s not quite right, is it? You’re here because you wanted him, because he was beautiful and intelligent and perfect and if he wanted you, maybe it meant you could be those things too.
And you could be. You could. The right clothes, the right fork at dinner, the right books in your hands, the right flowers arranged in the right way on the table. Everything he could want. Everything you wanted.
Wasn’t it?
It’s never enough; the fleeting glances, the absent touches, the nights passing in embraces too brief to feel. Always, he’s just out of reach, around the next bend in the maze, wavering on the edge of sight in the fog. Sometimes you think you could bathe in his blood and still long for more.
Sometimes you think you want to.
*
Instead, try this: you kill a man, and you feel nothing.
You’re too good, this time, to end up covered in blood. Too neat, too clean, too smooth, like honey and lip gloss and the drawl in your voice as you talk to the police.
He deserved it. What else is there to say?
Just this, you suppose: Este deserved to live. And who’s to say she didn’t? That the pair of you didn’t drive out of town, free and clear, rented boat back in its slip, guitar in the backseat and Este beside you up front. That a new life wasn’t waiting for you, the old one left behind, cut off and strangled like a man with bad intent and a guitar string wrapped around his neck.
They can’t prove otherwise.
*
Sometimes, this is how it goes: things end.
It’s nobody’s fault. That’s what you say, snapping it at friends who dare to tell you otherwise, who dare to come at you and denigrate him, who dare to act like he’s the monster here.
You’re allowed to do that, in the privacy of your own head, your own sad, empty rooms. Allowed to scream and sob and tear him to shreds, to wish with every ounce of bitterness in your soul that his will crack apart with what he’s done to you. They aren’t.
You chose him, after all. You started this, with secret kisses stolen behind closed doors, with giddy sighs and dresses worn just for him. With all the best intentions in the world.
And if he’s a monster, aren’t you too, just a little bit? Didn’t you both have a hand in stabbing this thing between you, in the end?
You have to believe you knew how to build a good thing once, if you ever want to do it again. And you will. Once you forgive yourself for him.
*
How about this? For a few moments, the script flips. This time, you’re the one left behind, the one grounded in the mundane, the everyday, the practical hometown girl in her reliable truck.
The one scrolling down your phone waiting for those static sparks to strike when you see her, and it’s never long in coming. There she is, with her red lip and golden hair, with her legs a million miles long and the blue of her eyes bright as a clear winter sky.
You can close your eyes all you want, but you’ll still see her, laughing from a magazine cover the same as she laughed up at you from your bed, clinging to the blankets. The same way she laughed a lifetime ago, spinning hand in hand in the park, two theater nerds falling off the swings, dizzy-drunk, hiccupping giggles between sweet kisses.
The same way you laughed down to her, standing center stage in the spotlight you angled her way. That was your job, to make her look effortless, to make sure all anyone ever saw of her was joy.
It’s the best one you’ve ever had, and maybe you’ll never stop trying to get it back.
*
That’s how it could have gone. Or maybe it was more like this: he’s still yours.
He never turned into that monster, not really; just something more prosaic. Not the city but the suburbs. Not the roller coaster, with its shrieks and squeals, the peaks and valleys and headrush loops. Just the merry-go-round. Just ups and downs in circles upon circles, the same disappointments on repeat.
And sure, maybe you chased other dreams, flew so high so fast you crashed, spinning out and down. Maybe for five minutes, you forgot him, but didn’t he forget you first?
That’s the problem with going round and around. You get dizzy, until you forget which way is up. Which way is the way home, and whether it’s even home anymore at all without him there waiting.
When you fall, will he still be there to catch you?
*
Here’s another story: you are made of magic, and still, you are trapped.
You thought you could do this, once. That you’d fit into the box he was desperate to live inside, that you could tame your light, that you could be normal. Perfectly mundane. You might even be encased in his house comfortably enough, you think. Maybe you wouldn’t even notice it happening, not until you tried to take a step and found your feet frozen, hands locked to your side. Nothing more than a pretty doll, sitting safe on his shelf.
Only you dream of a different lover. One who sees you with sightless eyes, phantom hands caressing your skin like shadows. One who lures you deep in the woods, tendrils curling up your throat until you can hardly speak, hardly think of anything else. One who makes you blaze bright with the bloom of springtime. Who draws out all your magic and bathes in your light; one who sees you for exactly what you are, not for what he wants you to be.
You know this much: there can be no choice without pain; no fire without ash, no frost without death.
And you strike a match.
*
Just once, you get to be a thief.
A good one too, all smooth dresses and smoother voice, honeyed whiskey on your tongue and dollar signs behind your eyes. Who’s to blame if an old man likes the way you flutter your lashes, if he likes to give you gifts. If he can be persuaded to make an investment or two. It’s his money, after all. His choice.
Just like it’s yours to say nothing when his daughter - a woman almost twice your age, mind - starts making eyes at the most obvious conman this side of the Mississippi. Only nobody but you seems to think he’s so obvious, and if she gives him all daddy’s money before you can drain it, that does nobody any good. Or at least not you, and you’ve got martinis to drink, diamonds to wear, a life to live. One that’s not about to get derailed by some asshole wearing a pretty face and the stupidest pair of boots you ever saw.
So it’s just business, really. You’ve got no choice but to perch next to this fellow bandit at the bar, to flirt and flutter and toss him sidelong glances he grins at while pretending not to catch. No choice but to whisper it right in his ear, tell him his game is up, and you were here first.
And when he’s less than amenable to that idea, well. Have you really got any choice but to kiss him? It’ll be easier if you’re both on the same side, after all.
Just don’t fall in love. Easy, right?
*
This is who you might have been: the lost princess in a fairytale gone wrong.
It was all supposed to be over. First the part where your bright, sunny life clouded over, the part where the villains flew in with their lies and accusations, the part where they drove you from your home, where the people turned on you in the streets. The part where the doors of your kingdom locked tight, leaving you on the wrong side.
But the prince caught you halfway down the cliff, saved you with a kiss. Didn’t he? Wasn’t he everything a prince is supposed to be - tall, handsome, rich and kind? He proclaimed in the most public fashion possible that he loved you; and if a prince loves you, you can’t truly be a witch, can you?
Isn’t that meant to be where the fairytale ends?
But sometimes, the end is only the beginning. Sometimes, kissing the prince feels wrong. Sometimes, the story doesn’t fit.
Sometimes, a distant horizon beckons you onward. Sometimes you leave the prince behind for the lover whose lips feel right against yours, even if they belong to a nobody. Even if scaling the cliff again on your own is harder than being carried. Maybe a witch is exactly what you always wanted to be.
Your story was never meant to be short.
*
Or perhaps there’s this: you love a little girl beyond words.
Sometimes, you see a flash of yourself in her, in the line of a pert nose as she turns her head. In the coltish limbs she loathes, that she hasn’t grown into quite yet. In the lilt of her voice as she sings along to every single song on the radio, while you quiet yours to better hear her.
You’ve spent your life doing that, of course. Quieting your voice, because it wasn’t the done thing to be a wife and a star, a mother and an artist, a grandmother and a performer. You were never going to get to have it all, not this time around. And you’d never trade any of it, not a single moment, not when it’s gotten you here, listening to a litany of girlish complaints as you follow the damp of her footprints up the stairs into the house, grocery bags in your arms. She’s yours, and if this is what you traded away your voice in exchange for - well. Nobody can say it wasn’t worth it.
Even so. You watch her and wonder if maybe - just maybe - she’ll make a different trade.
*
Maybe the facts are ugly - you like it when things are broken.
You like the sting of open wounds, the hiss of a still-healing burn. You like the ground-glass feeling in your heart, the whiplash of pain at the memory, at the sound of a name. A grudge is like a spell to you, repeated and cherished, nursed like a bruise, cast like a net.
What does pain do but teach you not to touch open flames, after all? It’ll teach you not to give away your heart to the first person who comes begging; not to lay out your trust like a rug waiting to be used as a catwalk.
Maybe that’s just what you get for having skin made of paper and bones like porcelain. Maybe everyone else is right and that’s just what you deserve. Maybe you’re a fool, an innocent, too naïve for the tarnished world you’ve fallen into. But porcelain breaks razor-sharp, and ain’t no cut that stings like a paper cut.
And you know damn well where you left the salt.
*
Here’s the real truth: you’re the hero.
Or something like it, at the very least. The winter is long, stumbling along these shores, and something in you forgets what you came here for. Forgets why you keep forging on over these rocks, forgets why you ever longed to feel the waves splash over your face.
There was a reason, once. That’s the only thing you’re certain of, and you cling to it as you board your ship. You fought for a reason.
It’s what you cling to as the waves on the horizon you so longed for rise up against you, all the voices of your fears and temptations in their crash. You had a reason. You sing it to yourself, a refrain to drown out the voices, even as the water’s force cracks your ship wide open. Even as you wash up on shore, a bedraggled shadow of yourself, all the magic you may have ever had scoured by salt, washed away in tracks streaming down your face.
You’re still singing it as you crawl up the river until you can go no further, until you collapse in the cool, dappled shade of a tree, branches swaying in the wind.
You open your eyes to golden light, to the creak of a floorboard and the purr of a cat, to a sturdy little cabin tucked in a bend of the river, and you remember.
You’ve made it home.