The Boat Knows the Way
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| The Lady of Shalott (1875) public domain John Atkinson Grimshaw |
The Boat Knows the Way
She is not going to Camelot.
Not really.
Camelot is only the name
we give the place
where wanting comes to collect its debt.
All her life
she watched the world
through a silver mirror,
its pleasures reduced to ghosts,
its lovers to reflections,
its sunlight borrowed.
She wove what she could not touch.
Then she looked.
Not at the reflection.
At the world itself.
The mirror cracked.
And something inside her
cracked with it.
So she came down from the tower.
No knight came for her.
No hand reached through the darkness.
Only the river.
Black beneath the bruised green sky,
slipping past the reeds
like something alive
that had been waiting.
She found the boat.
Likely, she was afraid.
Perhaps fear had become
too familiar to distinguish
from need.
She wrote her name upon the wood
and climbed inside.
Her white dress gathered around her
like a shroud
that had forgotten its purpose.
Then the current took her.
How strange,
that the first thing in her life
to offer her freedom
should also be carrying her toward death.
The castle faded behind her.
Ahead lay Camelot,
glimmering through the mist,
warm with fires
and people who still believed
the world belonged to them.
She closed her eyes.
For once,
she did not need to see
what was coming.
The river knew.
The boat knew.
Perhaps she knew too.
She was not fleeing death.
She was fleeing
the life that had made death
look like freedom.
And so she drifted on,
pale beneath the darkening sky,
her name carved into the wood,
a woman finally going
where she had always been forbidden to go,
toward the world,
toward the end,
toward herself.
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