first quarter

The Princess once told me she liked the potential that half moons represented--it was halfway between full and new, and you couldn't tell just by looking at it which way it was going. Would it wane and become a crescent? Would it bulge and wax until it grew full?

And because I'm me, of course I corrected her--that of course you could tell which way it would go by which half of the moon was illuminated, or simply by paying attention; of course she told me I didn't get the point, and at the time I was willing to accept that. But now I realized that I understood the point all too well.

She saw the moon--it was in its first quarter at the time--as her empire, of course. And the metaphor, the point she was making, is that she had inherited a half moon, with no way to tell whether it was waxing or waning. But it was waning, of course it was. Anyone who studied such things--and I did, it was why I was even in the same room as her--could have told her that.

That night when I tried to tell her which quarter she was looking at, she pinned me to the bed and covered my mouth and ordered me not to tell her; when a gibbous moon appeared above the horizon the following night she seemed pleased, like this was a good omen. And at the time I thought it was just a harmless game, maybe a little superstition--we all have our little foibles--but looking back I wonder if she wasn't making a point, that the truth, knowing where we'd been, where we were going, didn't matter.

And perhaps it didn't. I don't know what we could have done to stem the tide. But we'd all fought so hard for the truth, and sometimes I wonder if perhaps there was something, something none of us saw.