rainy day

My biggest concern, now that I've been free for so long, is that people will forget that she was, at heart, just a person. Sometimes I still think about the rainy days we'd spend together--stuck in the Academy, stuck in the palace, they all run together now. I'm imagining her in court dress running through the halls of the Academy, or in academic white in the halls of the palace. I don't know which part is accurate--maybe none of it is. Maybe it's made up, or maybe this one actually took place at my family's estate, or at the opera house, or . . .

What drew me to her is how passionate she was about whatever she had discovered recently. A book, an opera--it wasn't so much that she dreamed of being a philosopher-princess but that she was bound to become one. I can still see the glint in her eye, hear the barely contained enthusiasm in her voice, as she waxes poetic on the latest essays of her favorite philosopher, or describes the scene she loved most in the latest theatrical production. She spent so much of her life on guard, afraid that her enthusiasm might hold too much sway, but around me, at least, she let that guard down. And even after everything she's done--everything she did to me--I still miss those days. I'd never know where the conversation was going, and I'm not sure I ever really held my own, but I loved it.

Does this make her sound flighty? Perhaps she was. Perhaps after all these years, Princess Nevena IV, the dread figure that shattered the world, was just an excitable girl, who loved ideas and people too easily, who dreamed of a brighter future and couldn't settle on what that meant. I'm not sure anyone else got to see that side of her, but until the last time I saw her, that was who she was to me. Eager, enthusiastic, confident, and ever changing.

So, as scholars attempt to write a history of what happened, of her life, of what went wrong, I can't stop thinking of that time we sat on the rooftops of the Academy, huddled together in the rain, while she talked about all the dreams she had, what she wanted to do when the throne was hers, how she would make the world better with everything she had learned and studied. And I remember falling in love with that excitement, that energy, all over again.