It’s the story of the princess in the tower. She is alone. Her world is small. But she has read – her tower is full of books, and she knows that any given hero must build strength in the first arc of the story, in order to pull through in the last.
So she prepares all the ways she knows how, in trust that there will come a day: her hair grows long because she has heard that this is beautiful, and beauty is a kind of power. Practical, she builds her body, inventing routines – whatever will leave her sore the next day and tired this one. She memorizes edibility of plants she imagines, from her window, she can see. She reads still, and paints, and writes, and does everything that - in a tower - can be done. The quest is perfection, the endless refinement of body and soul.
Years pass. She writes treatises, treatments on the human plot, studying the concept of the world. She practices conversation, playing both sides, a student of human interaction. Her hair hangs far down the tower’s stone when she leans it out to tangle and dry. Her body is strong - each muscle toned and lean. There is, of course, more to be done. The outside world is unknown, so it is impossible to be truly prepared. She collects thistle seeds blown in on the wind, spins them, weaves them, creates a cloak so soft and warm that even in winter the tower’s stone seems friendly. Spring and summer, she sings, her voice carrying across the land in unheard arias. Note patterns more complex every year.
Her hair reaches the ground at the base, curling lightly where it brushes the grass. She pulls it in. No use in dirtying the ends. Her tower fills with its gold. Since time is no object, she devotes some months to coiling patterns in between imagining ideal political theory. Stroking one coil absently, she struggles to imagine what she’s read of family structure and how it could possibly reconcile with breaking the patterns of material inheritance that create inequality of class.
For some years, she becomes fascinated with astronomy. Each night, she watches out of her window, marking the motion of celestial bodies. She names the systems of stars she sees, and marks down the precessions in their orbits.
One night, she looks for the edge of the galaxy, but realizes that though the night is clear, she cannot define the pinpoints she sees in the way she once did. She frowns and turns inward again, deciding it is time to go back to botany.
Again, she catches seeds through her window in summer. The autumn winds dry them and blow in dust, which she collects for soil. All winter, she keeps a compost warm, fermenting and breaking down into a bed. Springtime, she plants dandelions and the helicopter seeds of maple.
The dandelions grow quickly, flower, seed, and fade. But the maples, slow to sprout, are still only knee high in a year. Out her window, she marvels at the spreading canopies and wonders at their timeless strength.
As the maples grow, they reach for her window, for the light it brings. She begins to be able to lean against them when she reads. She coils her hair into the branches; it is too heavy on her head and neck.
She sleeps with her head on the trees’ roots, imagining she can hear the life coursing in its veins. The light fades green through the leaves that fill the window now, her silver-gold hair tinsel in the branches.
The roots of the vine maple stretch the mortar as she rests unbreathing. The stones of the roof creak, and the tower grows old. Roots tumble down the tower wall and begin to curl as they reach the ground, and birds sing unheard arias from the tops.
The struggles of the world carry on, families growing, inheriting, as bones slowly fold into the trunk of a maple in the grove. Above, unmarked, starlight moves slowly through the sky.
