Prelude
to a Fairy Tale
I wish I could follow the four winds, letting the
gusts carry me to the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Ravens, swans,
and white horses could lead the way, their forms a beacon to that palace of
gold that waits atop the horizon. When I get there, I could cast off my red
shoes for slippers of glass, my feet twirling past midnight into gilded dreams
and happy endings. Beanstalks could topple, towers of green felled by the sweep
of an axe, and ells of golden hair could
be severed, but still the magic wouldn’t fade so long as I kept dancing toward
an ever after.
For now I lay in a coffin of gleaming glass, caught in
a spell that cannot be broken. A ruby apple full of poison lies beside me, one
bite missing from its crimson surface. I wait in a tower in the clouds, combing
my miles of hair by an open window waiting for a sign. My true love remains in
enchanted stasis, unable to see me or know me for what I am to him. The fairies
may bestow their enchantments and magic could hide out in the open, but for now
things linger at a standstill until the witch’s curse comes to an end. The
storybook is open, but the end of the story is obscured behind endless reams of
paper. “And they lived happily ever after” is an uncertainty among these
fantastical icons of Once Upon a Times and fairy tales that transcend the
passage of years. There’s only so many instances one can be stolen away by the
Snow Queen and lured astray by the promise of something greater before they
begin to think that it’s all only that, a fairy tale. Jorinda doesn’t return to
maiden form. The Beast remains a beast and Beauty doesn’t learn to love what
lies beneath the surface. Towers stand untouched. The prince marries the wrong
maiden while the mermaid dissolves into sea foam. Live in a fantasy world long
enough and reality appears coarser when it returns to spirit you away back to
the castle of ice and snow at the ends of the earth.
There’s only the hope to get you to keep dreaming, the
promise of the storybook yielding treasure untold when the trials have been
faced and the quests followed through. After all, maybe the struggles were just
a test devised to assess the strength of your will. Surrounded by a world
filled to the brim with enchantment and beauty among the tribulations, you
can’t help but hold fast to the idea of a fanciful conclusion written in
cursive script. “The End” can be interpreted so many different ways and lead to
a thousand possible outcomes if you can get that far. Until then, slay the
dragons that torment uncharted kingdoms. Journey over the miles to that land
unreachable. Let your heart never stray from what it is you want most in life. In
time, the fearsome trolls that reign will be vanquished. The land East of the
Sun and West of the Moon will always be there, an ideal to chase away your
darkest struggles when the sun has set to suppress the light.
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