The Sub Rosa Prism

I suppose every fairytale begins with someone believing what they should not have. The princess believes the stranger. The hero believes his own invincibility. The kingdom believes, against all evidence, that it will last. I was young enough, and certain enough of my own understanding, to believe I saw further than any of them. That was the first mistake. The second was setting it down on paper.I did not do it for fame. Fame, I have since learned, asks a great deal of a person and gives back very little worth keeping — mostly chairs that do not fit the body, and questions about things that made a good deal more sense while they were happening than they do now, remembered.I wrote because someone had to remember it correctly. Stories, left alone long enough, grow beautiful in ways the truth rarely allows. The hungry child becomes the chosen one. The lonely girl becomes a princess. The frightened boy is made a king by the time anyone thinks to write him down. Even the monster is granted, eventually, the dignity of being misunderstood — and the villain, once the wreckage has been swept far enough out of sight, becomes almost interesting.We prefer our stories finished. Our heroes lit from some source we needn't name. We like to imagine courage arriving whole, in a single unmistakable moment, dressed for the occasion.It was not like that. Courage, in my experience, rarely announces itself. More often it is a person standing when the legs beneath them have already decided to fail. A hand offered when leaving would have cost nothing. Mercy chosen at the one moment the world has finally stopped asking it of you.I know this because I was there for the parts no one thought worth singing about — the quiet between one crisis and the next, where the actual living happened. A tear wiped away before it could be witnessed. An apology given without an audience. A promise kept long after there was anyone left to notice whether it was.So I have set the account down as it occurred, or as near to that as memory permits once enough years have passed that moonlight and fact have learned to resemble one another. I have kept the mistakes in. I have kept the foolishness in. I have kept in, most of all, the fear — because a story with the fear removed is not a memory anymore. It is only a decoration.I will not give my name. Not yet. Perhaps someone, later, will find these pages and wonder about the girl who thought she had the right to correct the legend. Let them wonder. I was only a girl who watched extraordinary things happen to people who had not asked to be extraordinary, and understood, before anyone else seemed to, that the story being told about it was already beginning to lie.Why I have written this — what this account is finally for — I will leave for the reader to decide. But I can tell you plainly who it is for, in the smaller, truer sense of that word: for the one person who will go on living after I no longer do. She is myself, made better. She is my daughter.