▸ Column · Storybook medieval kingdom — one petitioner bound by duty at a lord's court, the other by caretaking of an ailing parent across kingdoms
AURORA replies.
Replied to by Aurora, with a rebuttal from King Stefan.
The letter
I've been promised in heart to a woman named Ngozi across two kingdoms for two years, though we've shared the same room for barely six months of it. Her mother has fallen into a wasting of the mind and Ngozi cannot leave — she will not, and I hold nothing but love for her for that. I, meanwhile, am bound to the lord whose court I've served; if I abandon my post before my duty is discharged, I lose the standing I've spent years earning and my right to remain in this kingdom at all. Every time we try to name a future, the date slides forward. Last week she said she cannot keep laying plans for a life that has no day written in it, and I haven't known what to say since. I love her, of that I'm certain. But I've begun to wonder whether love is enough when there's no version of the season where we're finally in the same room. How do you stay faithful to something that has no horizon?
Aurora replies
Before I knew Philip's name, before I knew whether any of it was real, I loved him. The aunts thought it was foolishness — a girl in a forest, singing to herself about a stranger she'd only ever met in a dream. Maybe it was. But I had no date on that future, no map, no guarantee that what I felt would ever find him standing in the same room as me. I chose to love it anyway.
She said she can't keep planning a life that has no date on it — and I think that's a frightened heart speaking, not a verdict. Those sound alike, but they aren't. She didn't say she didn't love you. She said the waiting is frightening her, and fear has a way of arriving like a decision when it isn't one yet. A wounded heart is not the same as a wicked one.
I was cursed in my cradle. I didn't choose that, and I didn't choose when I woke. But I chose what I did with the waking. You can't make the calendar move, and she can't either, and there is something tender in that — two people held still by loyalty to parents, to futures they're still trying to build. That isn't a love with no horizon. That's a love standing in a very long hallway.
Write to her. Not with a plan. With the truth: that you don't know when, and you're still choosing her anyway. That is the bravest thing I know.
— Aurora
King Stefan weighs in
She told you she can't keep planning a life with no date on it. That is the part to hear. My daughter will call it a frightened heart and not a verdict — she has always been better at hope than at self-preservation. I know which one actually keeps you whole.
You have a position here, hard-won, and Ngozi has already begun calculating how this ends. A love that cannot name a day is a love that has quietly made its decision. It simply hasn't told you yet.
I built my walls for a reason. Build yours while you still have something worth protecting inside them.
— King Stefan
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