ophelia ; waiting for the curtain call

She could find herself, say, in Denmark near the ramparts of her fiancé’s great stone castle, the simple notion of a tragic heroine – let’s say a woman no longer quite so young who truly ought to have been married by now but her fiancé is still taken with his prepositions of youth and passion, in the boughs of a groaning willow tree on a cool autumn’s day when the wind is whistling through her hair and hiding everything from her vision in a sea of maize and ivory, hands dirt-stained in a way that suggests she is not used to the mundanity of peasantry but indulges in it as any high-born child feels obligated to (isn't she the same as the commoners? what sets them apart other than her rings and her obedient attendants and her satin bedsheets and the crown to be set upon her beloved's dark hair? doesn't she deserve this little bit of freedom?) and she thinks: isn't it odd that she can't hear the Church bells ringing from here, but why should she mind it - she's never been particularly faithful, no hardly devout, simply effortlessly good and pure (she knows it is true for they've always told her so, ever since childhood she's been good Ophelia, pure Ophelia, sweet Ophelia, young Ophelia - she is no longer as young as she was, dainty wrists and ankles starting to thicken and sag with the promise of age), let's say she's missing home - that there were always more trees at her estate - and that crouching in the crook of the willow's rough embrace of bark and woodchips perhaps she feels that she is younger, that she can be good Ophelia, pure Ophelia, sweet Ophelia, young Ophelia for a little bit longer, just as long as her feet don't touch stone and she drinks only from the river; she considers how life were to be if she became a nymph, apart from all this business of royalty and political hubub - she does not doubt that more than a few of her fiancé’s future advisors have daggers hidden well in the folds and layers of their lavish doublets - he has waited so long to wed her, he has no heir to avenge him if for any reason those bearded men drunk on decades worth of wine from his father's table decide that he is not fit to be king, and she cannot imagine being spared as Gertrude was: she is not cunning as she was, she has only the mere clarity of mind from being left alone with nothing but her hair and her hands for most of her life because women are nothing more than lips and wombs and her fiancé spends all his time sailing away from his duty and away from Denmark and away from her because what has love ever been good for when you never outgrew your adolescence? - testosterone has always been more trouble than it's worth, she thinks, and fantasises about playing chess with Gertude (can she truly call Gertrude her mother-in-law? it's something she's been deliberating over for far too long - after all, this engagement has been a rather drawn-out affair), the two of them perched in the boughs of this same willow, black and white checkered board balanced precariously on a protruding knot and Ophelia already knows that she will lose - Gertrude has been playing games with higher stakes for years; Ophelia is just a girl in the face of Gertrude's wizened veneer, a pawn to her queen, checkmate is what the elder will say, with no real malice or passion in the even tones of her voice because they both knew it would never end any differently, so Ophelia bows her head and smiles slightly because she is only good Ophelia, pure Ophelia, sweet Ophelia, young Ophelia - smart Ophelia has never been one of her titles (and neither has dumb Ophelia so she counts her lucky stars and hopes not to see them wink out one by one) - so here sits our Ophelia in the boughs of the very same willow that will one day kill her - (she will be called mad Ophelia, pathetic Ophelia, and women not so young will look at the portrait a man paints of her corpse and wonder if she is freer as she floats down the stream) - here we watch our dirt-soled Ophelia, free-haired Ophelia, gazing up at a fortress built of stone and waiting for her tragedy to begin.