The Stillness That Once Saved Me
My fingers lock in a death grip where I sit, creaking like the branches around me. The wind brushes past the skin on my cheeks, fluttering the leaves on the vines that wrap around my arms up to my neck. It is easy to breathe around them now. We have accepted each other as one and the same, as beings that grow together until you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends.
I can’t remember why I sat here in the first place, but I know it felt safe. Hidden away from a life too open. Too dangerous. The light is always strange, a draft chilling my arms from somewhere far away. The quiet of the years I have spent here makes my ears sensitive; I flinch at any sound, even from a distance. Sometimes I think I hear laughter, boots crunching on dry ground, my best friend calling me with fractured words. I never dare listen long enough to know if they’re real.
My dark eyes only crack open slowly once a day when the sun is brightest, when the vines and I both look up towards the warmth. The roots feed on the rays, growing deeper into the skin of the forest’s single monarch, holding me down on this throne. Their embrace used to sting. They would pinch me, twist me back each time my thoughts of standing grew too large for them to hold. Now moss covers me in the soft comfort of a mother’s arms, telling a face I have forgotten that it is beautiful.
I stopped believing them as the years dragged over my body. Their words grew fragile as the stems and leaves began crawling across my face. Flashes of an older woman with the same dark hair as mine jolt across the back of my eyelids. A distant memory of my cheek being held by something softer, made up of lines engraved with kindness. These thoughts cause the leaves to whisper words of safety into my aging ears: that to live is to experience pain much worse than the nettles caressing my skull. The skull of a queen who is meant to be here, adorned with silence and time.
Endless time.
The forest knows me. It has all my being entirely wrapped up in its green arms so that I cannot lie. The vines do not know that I still dream. Behind my closed eyes isn’t pitch black and counting seconds, but colour. The owner of the voice that calls to me through the trees is shining, arm outstretched to me, beckoning me forwards. I see mouths that stretch wide and a body that runs. I know it’s only a dream, but I stay there as long as I can, still and cautious, hoping the trees won’t see what I’m doing beneath their canopy.
Distant knocking always wakes me, the rattling of a door I haven’t opened in a long time. The dreams always end with a thorn-free hand, holding something that glints silver, something sharp. They are going to set me free. Finally. I can never see their face, only the lines on their palms showing me the path to freedom. The throne feels especially cold on the days after those dreams.
I feel most comfortable in the rain. The vines soak up the droplets, and the noises of the forest are swallowed by the torrent until they can’t hear my eyes join the clouds. The grey sheet of water hides my open eyes and the reflection of sunlight that remains in them, no matter how long they have tried to dry them out. My feet burn as I stare unblinkingly at the edge of the clearing, where the sun peeks through on summer days, enough to create new shapes on the ground.
My eyes track them with expert precision, wishing I could feel them with my own hands, run my fingertips through the blades of grass until they trust me enough to remove my nettle crown. My head feels heavier with every shape I trace that looks like home.
Guilt wraps around my throat to join the brambles, skin itching from the fear of my own desires. A queen who wants to leave her own kingdom truly is a traitor. A betrayal the bark of this throne will never forgive me for. Even now, my body begs me to run and submerge myself in flowing water like I have lived there before, like it knows how to.
My friend is shouting for me. I can’t hear what she is saying, and it is shattering me like a disappointed plate on a tiled floor. In the darkness of this rainy night, I try to move my left wrist and feel the thorns dig deeper, the sharpness mixing with my blood until I can taste it. The warning rushes around my body, reminding me that what’s out there, beyond the clearing, is unknown.
The stillness that once saved me is strangling me now. This throne is too soft to be made of wood. The pain in my wrist blurs beneath the pressure building in my chest.
Being the queen on this throne may be all I was meant to be, but the need to know if I could be more is all-consuming. Going out there may hurt me, grip me with something harsher than leaves until I am begging for my forest to let me back in. Still, I can’t tear my eyes away from the sunlight.
I pull my wrist harder, wiggling my fingers through the resistance until one finger becomes free. Specks of red dance amongst my landscape of green so starkly that my eyes unfocus, and the forest flickers around me. My little finger finally bends after countless years of holding tightly to the arm of this throne. It is just enough to crack the bone and feel the air underneath it. The cold shocks me enough to raise goosebumps all over my body. The skin on my cheek twitches.
I think to love myself is to suffer the consequences. Limb by limb, I will untangle myself. I will stand cold and shaking, afraid of what my name will be once I am stood on my own two feet. I need to stop the relentless burning of my body as my mind wanders to somewhere I cannot yet reach.
Tonight, when I enter my dreams, I think the face of my rescuer will become clear. I will look up into dark eyes that shine as bright as an April sunrise. Her body is scarred and stiff, yet wholly her own. The silver will flash towards me. Blood, sap and tears mixing together until I don’t know who is bleeding. I will laugh for the first time in decades as I take her hand and watch her hair flow in the cool evening breeze, held back by a crown woven from nettles.
Becca Rose is a writer based in Greater Manchester, UK. Her work explores interior worlds through image, embodiment, and emotional restraint.