A Drag Path

1. But It's My Crown

In every child's fairy tale, the princess always finds love and a happy ending no matter the odds. When a child dreams of her own fairy tale, the story always starts with a loving family before a partner sweeps them off their feet.

Sometimes, the dream remains just that - a silly dream they saw when innocence still sat at their core.

Other times, the child wakes up in a cold sweat - alone, hand clamped over their mouth to keep the screams in, and scared - because the prince turned into an ugly monster and the family stood by, watching as it wreaked havoc.

Emily Dickinson's claim to fame is her elegant depiction of the love and pain carried in a heart.

Love was a heartbreak waiting to happen and Riya Abhishek Prem Mehra's first heartbreak was the mother she never knew and the father who chose to put her on the back burner.

Therefore, she doesn't understand why people preach about the wonders of the heart. The emphasis on that one organ dictating her choices in the most irrational ways doesn't make much sense to her. The whole idea was ludicrous.

She needed her mind, her quick wit, and her instincts to survive in this family driven by politics, encased in manipulation, and held together by lies. The heart's indecisiveness - longing for a safe place to land - was a liability.

She waited for good weather to take off, only for the winds to send her crashing to the ground. The heart could get people killed, and it could get her killed faster than if she took a bullet to said heart. She'd bleed out, drop by drop and die a slow, painful death had she let it see the light of day.

When it came down to it, it was just muscles, nerves, tissues, blood cells and other complicated terms her professor once fleetingly mentioned. She cringed a little at the gross oversimplification of its performance. It was just an organ - a gruesome blob of red, blue and a little white sometimes that operated systematically.

Contract. Release. Rinse. Repeat.

But in all the same sense, it was life.

It had to be taken care of for it to work properly and to keep the body alive. To be able to give life and continue doing so until it can't go on any longer, it had to be nurtured with love. It doesn't know loss, but it understands grief. It doesn't see beyond red but races when we fall in love. It doesn't meet the source of fear but trembles when we are afraid. It attends a funeral from the sidelines but aches like a soldier returning from war.

So maybe the heart is more than just a blood-pumping organ. It was love in its rawest form, and its rhythm gave life meaning.

Contract - love.

Release - disappointment.

Rinse - grieve.

Repeat - stupidity.

Yet, Riya kept hers locked in cages even when believing that there was no use protecting something made of nothing more than flesh. She couldn't control how fast or slow it beat, but she could control who saw it and who was allowed to take up space in it. After all, Elsa was considered a Disney princess too.

But at six, Riya was no longer her father's princess.

"All I asked was for one evening, chief."

Princesses walked through kingdoms and watched everyone bow at their feet as if they were god's greatest gift. They didn't wait for the world to stop moving for them; they controlled it with the tip of their fingers, bending it to their will. Each soldier would stand guard while the hand maidens pampered the royal family.

Riya was not a princess anymore. She stood guard at the gates of the Mehra mansion, eyes sun-baked and bone-weary. She would wait for the white SUV to cross the gates and her father to tuck her in at night. The world had never stopped spinning and it had forgotten about her - small, innocent, untouched by the malicious things of this world - along the way. The part no one talks about is that trapping a heart inside a ribcage made of golden iron, the rhythm stops sounding like life and starts sounding like a prison sentence.