Bird-Watching Is The Noblest Pastime

This story begins as any good story would-- in a faraway castle of a faraway land. It has a king, a queen, a princess, the dashing love interest. It has an evil witch. Unfortunately for all the fictional involved, the narrator is a piece of shit.

She is the dirt on the sole of the shoes of the janitor of the shittiest bar in hell. She does not know the king's name, or the queen's, or the princess's. She could not tell you what happens two seconds into the story, or a minute, or a decade.

The shittiest narrator in the world only knows the ending. She knows it ends in death.

Or perhaps, she wants it to end in death. Why should fairy-tales exist after all? They're the shards of Mother Mary's glass mural in a church in Vatican City. The priest lies dead beneath. His white robes are red. His cross is red. His eyes are red as more drips down his forehead and into them and turns them as unseeing as Mary's beside him. They're cruel, that is to say; Cruel and haughty and so far removed from the pain that is reality.

Like every other child fed lies in illustrious covers of knights and dragons, the narrator too clung to the shadows all her beautiful and youthful years (she's only seventeen now. Yes, you might argue the youthful years stretch till twenty, but darling, seventeen is the new sixty) waiting for friendship and love to find her like it inevitably had everyone. Then she found out her best friend had a best friend, and the boy she liked had a girlfriend, and her love for writing was shared by everyone better than her, and then she looked down and realized she wasn't in the shadows. She was them. She was crying and her wails sounded like the screeching of a wild beast threatening everyone to stay away.

What to do? What to do? Oh my prince who is not mine, who merely exists on paper and in my imagination, how unfortunate I am alive and thus feel. How do I live with being invisible? How do I live knowing this is all my doing? I should have never listened to my anxiety when it told me to complete the school assignment when all my friends wanted to hang out. I should have spoken to him, the tall, dark-haired boy with the brightest of smiles-- whom I have liked since last year. I should have asked him if he wanted to go out with me, fear of rejection be damned. I didn't. Now no one remembers me and if I exist or I don't, does it matter?

The story continues in the periphery-- a huge chunk lost to the narrator's lament. We are on the passionate love making now that won't be described because that's not the kind of thing we promote. If smut readers are present, think a dick, a vagina and lots of unholiness.

The rogue sailor breaks away. His lips are ridiculously, certainly not-very-unattractively, swollen. The princess, mussed and satiated beside him, struggles to break through the pleasant haze clouding her mind. "My brother almost caught me sneaking out yesterday. For all the love we share, I cannot bear the secrecy it demands of us. I am certain they will accept us. I am not in line for the throne, my choices are of no consequence. They will surely bless our union." The sailor looks lovingly into the eyes of the woman who has thoroughly enraptured him since the moment they met, and agrees. Tomorrow, they will meet the royal family.

The narrator, if you're wondering, hangs by a sling rope hooked to the window of the fairy-tale couple's room. The stones jutting out the walls of the dingy inn dig painfully into her hips and the straps of her binoculars are nearly taking her out. Why the binoculars? She was bird-watching. When the story progresses hither, she focuses thither. But the ears miss nothing. The moral resolution is coming, she can feel it in her bones. The princess will advocate for the sailor, the smirk will fall away and he will smile genuinely for the first time. The king will realize class doesn't define character. They will wed (the princess and the sailor, that is).

To this, the narrator, now swaying in the heavy winds of the approaching storm, says, Fuck it. The rain pelts her like stones and she says, It is unfair the world makes some people so bright their fucking light could grow plants. It is unfair no matter how hard I try, my voice just can't stay loud long enough for people to know I exist. It is so fucking unfair I am a writer, projecting my insecurities onto ink puppets hoping someone across the globe will sympathise with me. What do I get doing all this? Trying? The moment I stop screaming is the moment I stop existing.

The braid she spent hours on to look just messy enough is now a horse's tail.

The metaphysical realm progresses at a different pace, and a thought later, the new day begins (Do you expect me to write all day? I have to make time for sorrow). The princess stretches in her hay bed, a sinking feeling taking shelter in her heart already. What was that thud? Did someone fall off the window? She is off to the palace before her love can awake. She needs to set an easy laying ground for the surprise to land later. It feels like someone is following her, or rather a bush of itchy flowers a name she cares for not. It must be a different bush right? Certainly not the one she saw at the gate of the inn, and a few metres after that, and a few meters after that, and a few....

Royal guards are at the palace gates, too many for it to just be a regular Tuesday. Are they for her? "Your highness", the balding knight in the centre of the menacing V-formation says. "The king has ordered us to see you to him. Immediately." Her heart is in her throat, and it beats like a frantic hummingbird. Break free of the cage, I must. My anxiety cannot be contained by my unathletic body.

The walk up to him is scary; the man himself is a terror. Her father looks menacing, an empty throne-room not enough to hold his kingly wrath. The spy has already departed. The prince and the queen are on their way.

"You would abandon your family for a lowly scum?" It's not a shout; It's a whisper. A whisper.

"Father", the princess starts. The winds are afraid to carry her voice back to the king. "If you would just meet-- talk with him. Once. You'd see he's a good man. A kind man. The locals can vouch for-- Not the sea merchants, of course-- the common people-- the kids at the new orphanage-- They can. He's a good man."

Frantic footsteps. Her remaining family is here. The queen looks scared. The prince looks disapproving. Her father has not moved. He tilts his head,"A kind man. I suppose that is enough to justify an abandon of all rational thought. Of the royal image that makes us who we are. That reminds people who is on the throne and who will be next. If the princess takes her pick as she pleases, who is to say what kind of pleasures the heir to throne thrives off of?"

The narrator hangs by the chandelier, listening with a held breath the shocking words of a father to his daughter. Is this the climax? Is this the moral villain finally to light? No, the prince is yet to speak his piece. It's his turn.

"Is this another one of my duties-- to share in the mistakes of my sister? Is this my eternal punishment--- to do everything you asked for yet bear insults to my character in such poorly disguised veils?" The queen's hand flies to her mouth. The princess feels the ink bleeding through the pages. The narrator struggles to free her collar from where she hangs onto the fucking chandelier of all places.

The King raises an eyebrow. The bastard acts like this was all his plan. "A simple nudge and you go careening off the cliff. A simple thought spoken aloud and you show you lack the control of a ruler. Is this all it takes for you to lose it? A faulty sister?" He strides forward to where the prince stands. The princess takes a step back, like the words had been directed at her. They had.

They're eye to eye. Father and son. And then they're not. Red blooms the beauty of the rose her love gave her their first meeting. It spreads across her brother's cheek, an angry handprint that struck the soul. The narrator falls to the black tiles behind them.

Why can't I say something that matters? Someone's already said better or worse. Please let me be more than present. Please, just once.

The queen's lips tremble. She has always been so powerless. A daughter, then a wife. A powerful man, then a powerful man. Silent, then silent. Her kids, though, not them. "Do not raise your hands on my children, Arthur." She grabs hold of her son's arms as he stands once more. "I care little how I am treated, but I will not stand while you belittle my children." A rebellion-- declared in front of the king himself. After all, no big dilemma is needed to challenge the king. You could question his cereal preferences and be declared an enemy of the crown.

"Is that it? I try to protect my family from the kingdom's watchful gaze, and I invite a rebellion? Don't you think of the pain it gives me to strike my son, to reprimand my daughter, to check my wife? I do it so people don't have a striking realization one day that their king-to-be is as emotional as their thumb-sucking tod. That the queen herself fails to stand by the king. That the princess," a scoff,"can't control her urges."

I am fifteen again. I have joined a new school. I sit in the corner. I wait for someone to notice me. I sit all day.

The prince has had enough.

Enough. I am not what I show. I want to be more than what I say.

A sword is drawn. Maybe by the prince because he has had enough. Maybe by the king because he sees his son has had enough.

Does it matter what we intend? All that matters is what becomes of it.

"Someone help," the princess screams. The guards are already gone.

Look at you. You did not want to be invisible but you are. No one texts you to hangout on Saturday. All the gossip you know is because of that tight-knit group sitting in front of you in calculus. Look at you, can you even see you?

The queen's stomach spurts blood and it doesn't matter if her son killed her or her husband. She's dead.

You're dead without ever dying.

The princess screams, and kneels in front of a still king who looks down the corpse of his wife. Is this when control leaves him? Or is it when his son tackles him to the ground and wraps his hands around his neck? He claws at his son's eyes, his fingers sinking into the wierdly wet flesh with a sickening squelch. The prince falls back. There's so much pain.

The world is pain. We wait for someone to notice us, and when no one does, we convince ourselves it's because the girl next to us was too pretty. The boy next to us was too charming. My darling, you're just too unremarkable.

The sword is in soft, trembling hands now. The blood that drips down it splatters on her gown. The princess shows spine at last, but what of courage shown too late? The king swats her away as would a fly and claims his weapon once again. His son is the one who started it. This will end with him.

I wanted to write fairy-tales. I am a hateful creature. I can't write fairytales.

The blade vanishes into the princess's stomach. Her father drops it in stunned silence. She threw herself in front of her brother to protect him.

Tell me how to be better. This silence is a part of me. Tell me how to be better.

The void remains silent. I remain silent.

The king is mad, my people, the king is mad. His son is dead. He's mad and he's dying. The blade that kills everyone returns home at last.

I went home and cried that day. It was the first day in a new school but my bones were already hollow. I will always be invisible. No matter what I try.

Everyone's dead. Nothing to show of a legacy that lasted generations. The sailor is here now. He's speechless. A softer dawn will never come-- it will always be a rustic red smeared over porcelain skin. He stumbles on the king's corpse. The sword still holds him upright. He feels the wetness of the ground beneath him and cringes. He cannot express his disgust; He cannot look away. He's walking past the dead bodies.

The sailor is now standing under the chandelier.

"What happened?" The words are directed downwards where a fifth figure is sprawled on the ground. She looks up. "Did you kill them? Is this your doing? Who are you? What--" He takes in a rattled breath. Who is this stranger at his feet, who looks at him scarred and scared, just as much a victim of whatever happened as those behind?

The narrator rises. And then she walks off.

A boy from my class messaged me one day. He told me he liked me. We never got together. Never even talked within school walls.

It was the first time I knew what it meant to be desired.