If the Leaf Should Reach You

Dear A.,

I write to you from the elm tree – the one where we first met. Do you remember? You plucked a leaf, dropped it into the river’s current below, and told me you’d see it again, since the river flowed all the way from my lands to yours. Is it possible that a leaf so small could make such a journey? You never did tell me.

And after all these years, still, I wonder.

I don’t know if these words will make it to you. The only person I now trust to arrange for this letter’s delivery is my most trusted attendant, Sasha. But she is watched; we all are. The mood has shifted, the silence within our walls suffocating. I know what it means, even though my father forbids “any matters of national interest” to be spoken in my presence. He forgets what the rattle of a teacup in its saucer sounds like when there’s talk of war. But mostly he underestimates Sasha. She is the only one who treats me as an adult, trusts that I will do greater good with knowledge than without. She has served our family faithfully since before I was born – back when my mother was alive. She says my father is different now – rootless, like a frayed rope cut lose from its anchor. She pretends to follow my father’s orders, but only I know there is another who supersedes him. Even in death, it is my mother who inspires and guides Sasha’s servitude and loyalty. I’ve thanked Sasha before for keeping the secret of our continued correspondence, for risking her life to receive and post our letters. She only shakes her head like she’s about to say something, and instead bows to me deep from her waist, the same way she once bowed to my mother.

I have worried what my father might do if Sasha’s subtle obstinance were to ever be exposed, but he has become increasingly secluded, agitated, hardly aware of his surroundings. He is erratic, kind and reasonable one minute, and distrusting the next. Just the other day we took tea in the gardens. All was well until I brought up the subject of my betrothal to you, asked whether it might still be a worthwhile consideration. He became furious at the notion, followed by a wave of suspicion, wondering if something or someone had prompted the query. He continued to rant well into sundown, accusing your own family of being in league with our enemies to the south, his features so changed over the course of the conversation as to be nearly unrecognizable there in the twilit dark.

Is this the curse of ruling? To grab hold of any bend you find in a person, imagined or otherwise, then twist? If so, it is not a life I want. Please excuse me bluntness; I know my duties. But you asked in your letter what I would do, given a choice. I don’t have an answer. But if ruling this land means becoming like him, then it is not what I’d choose. He is not unkind or cruel, just so…afraid. I see it in the shake of his hands, as if he’s rattling the prison bars. And I am prisoner with him, the fear holding him, and thus holding me like the weight of a pillow held over my face. No one can hear me scream.

And yet, it is not so simple. He is my father, and I know he loves me. For all of this, I still love him in return. I am doomed, as such, no matter my path forward – for I am beginning to understand it will involve leaving my father and breaking his heart, or staying with my father and breaking my own. I know you’d opt for my own heart’s preservation– but do you know the cost of breaking a heart, holding the knife in your own hand? I fear the backlash, already feel the knife’s handle reverberate like a struck bell, a fissure cracking deep in my bones. My heart would not withstand – it would shift apart like continents, in the aftershocks. And I ask myself, what is better, then, to break one heart or two?

I am embarrassed by how much I am ready to share with you. I have tried writing prettily of things less weighted, tried writing of the view from my elm tree. But what is my little view to the Blue Bend you wrote of in your last letter – the view as you saw it before, as a boy, carefree, running one hand through the long grass, other hand in your mother’s, and the view standing on the bluff after, as a man, alone, river frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog. There, before you, the greatest depths and the greatest heights all in one view. And your question, then, whether you could ever again still have eyes to see the Blue Bend, just as it is? I don’t know. But I do know I never cared to see it before now, but after reading your letter more times over than my favorite book, I realize it is the kind of place I want to see, with you.

You asked what it was – my favorite book – I haven’t forgotten. It is a small volume with no title, just a simple gold foil of a mountain shrouded in voluminous clouds. The story follows a young man from a poor farming village who gets lost on the mountaintop, passes through a cloud as white and dense as fallen snow. When the fog clears, he finds himself in a foreign land reigned by a benevolent King and Queen. In this cloud realm, there is no war or hardship, and the ground always bears a vast harvest, the sky yielding a gentle rainfall within the turning of seasons. The young man marvels and falls in love with the King and Queen’s daughter. After a year they marry and live a life of joy and abundance. But the young man carries his old life like a weight upon his back, his shoulders drooping a little lower each day, and he eventually decides to return to his village to see his family, and bring them back to the cloud realm. His new wife pleads with him to stay, explaining that once he leaves the kingdom in the clouds it will be hard to return. But the young man insists that because he found her kingdom once, he will be able to do so again. Once he descends the mountain, though, and find his way back at his small farming village, he is shocked to find nothing as it was – his very farmhouse a meager lean-to, and his family no longer living. While he only spent two years’ time in the cloud kingdom, a full two hundred years had passed in his old village. Dejected and alone, the man walks back up the mountainside, but cannot find the cloud kingdom, no matter how hard he looks. It is said he still wanders the mountains, searching for home.

This story is lacking in joviality, I’ll admit, but truly there has never been a story that has affected me more. It stays with me when I sleep and when I wake. I dream of this cloud kingdom, and sometimes I even think I see the gates from my window, nestled up on the mountaintop – a glint of gold at a billowing cloud’s center. I have dreamt so much of the man from this story that sometimes I think I must be him. You think I’m crazy, and I suppose I am, but there it is – I ache all over when I think of him.

I am sorry – I should not have written that last bit. I am not accustomed to having a friend like you, or any friend at all for that matter. I feel stunted in the proper ways to converse, the questions to ask. Should I ask after your health, the weather, as I know is proper? Or should I ask what I really want to know: what you will do now that our betrothal is void? I feel a pawn in a game I am not invited to play, plucked to the side.

I hope, no matter our future, that you won’t forget this, forget me. I have been given books and illustrious tutors to guide my learning, but never a friend. I have Sasha, who sees me as the woman I could become, and my father, who sees me as the child I no longer am. But you. You write to me, simply, as I am. You are North. If I am ever to slip from this elm tree, bear the fall, sink into the clear waters unscathed, it is to you I will go.

Yours,

C.