Darkness of the Everyday

K. Ryan, 2006—an overlong characterisation piece.

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“Her Highness—the lady Epiphany. Her Highness—Crown Princess Elene.”

Lena never likes making an entrance after Epiphany. Somehow she always feels shabby—what, exactly, can follow such a name? The ‘Crown Princess Elene’, Lena knows, is anticlimactic in every sense. The younger girl never has to strive for charm—she isn’t a little blonde shadow, squeaking at the dark and hating herself for it. She is effortlessly sweet, with a thick skin, something Lena has never had. This ‘Crown Princess’ walks quiet and slow, not because it is stately but because whenever she falls, she bruises.

Delicate, people say too embarrassed to pronounce pathetic. Her nerves become sensitivity the same way; ‘frightened’ undergoing a wonderful metamorphosis into the more romantic and less accurate ‘recluse’. The words that shroud Epiphany are more robust—but with that name, what else can anyone expect?

Lena knows the heir should interact with other people without flinching from their messes and everyday complications and dirt. The heir should not be selfish, and locking yourself up in a tower to lean over railings and watch birds is laughable. The heir should at least try to know the real world.

Lena is terrified of the real world. Whenever she touches it she falls. Falling means bruising, and bruising means blood and small breaks under skin. To fall means landing hard in the dirt. Inescapable, impossible; smudges and darkness all over her, and she is left small and curled up and helpless in simple filth.

She falls every time, and should be broken, because each fall is from a higher place, a warmer and more slippery place, where she can never see because she is always trying to breathe. The real world steals from her, takes her control and her heart and her dreams, twisting them into a rope to hobble her with until she is little better than an animal, all instinct and fidgets and feelings, and when she stumbles on those feelings she falls. She is smashed to bits, only she wakes up every morning.

Lena knows that the crown princess is meant to have friends—that it should be easy to have friends, an entourage, but the thought makes her shudder, turns her hot-and-cold.

Nothing frightens her more, or delights her more, then the words, “my best friend,” in someone else’s voice.

That is what trips the Crown Princess Elene, and she hates everyone for it.

She is smashed to bits, only she wakes up every morning.