Sometimes I find myself wondering why people can settle; why they can see faults in their own lives, or in the lives of others, and think that it is, “simply good enough”. I have an inkling that perhaps not everyone in the world is willing to settle for what is merely sufficient, but the people around me certainly are. The clearest example of this I can muster is that of my father. A wealthy king and a renowned strategist, he can almost immediately recognize the disquiet in a system and acknowledge its capacity to cause harm. However, when asked for a solution he does not make a single movement to relieve the cause. Instead, he settles for actions to relieve the symptoms of such social malady; actions that are as ineffective as a bandage being placed over a compound fracture. Sure, with a piece of gauze covering the injury it is invisible to third-party persons, but if you don’t do something about it sooner or later, it’s going to fester. It’s not as though I’m being critical of my father, or of his kingdom. I’m just… pondering, I guess you could say? I’m genuinely interested in finding out just how one becomes so content to leave things with only the appearance of full-functionality.
Perhaps my father has lost his concern for his kingdom in the same way that I have lost my awe of it. From my favorite perch on the eastern tower, where I usually escape to after my deportment or embroidery lessons, I see visiting lords and ladies look up in wonder. They see the large, polished blocks of limestone and the enormous, billowing flags our handmaidens have sewn to perfection, and they cannot help but gasp at the sheer grandeur of this place I call home. They taste the fresh meats and fruits served at the grand banquets, and feel the plush furs that adorn the beds of our surplus bedrooms, and think that they are surely in heaven. For me, the glamour has faded. I see in the stone walls the labor of many unnamed men, and remember the bone-chilling cold such walls seem to emit. The flags bear colors and images so familiar to me, I barely see them now. At the banquets and in my chambers, I can no longer enjoy the luxuries I have been granted, for I know that there are others outside our walls who struggle to find scraps to fill their hollow cores while we gorge ourselves daily. Such heavy thoughts turn my silken bedclothes rough, and make the furs I once thought unmanageably hefty seem insubstantial.
However, that’s not what scares me most. It is not my daily internal battle that I find terrifying, nor is it the far more material battle of my father’s subjects. The thought that chases me in my dreams, the one that reduces me to a mere child clutching at my nurse’s skirts in horror, is one I wish I could bury in a ditch far from here, to be forgotten. It is the reality that I can do nothing to change the world around me; that I will be forever ensnared in this tortured life of sumptuousness, because I am Princess Renalda Serephine, fourth and final daughter of King Hurston Seraphine of Panacea. As the youngest princes off a famous nation, my only work is to be completely unremarkable; and a princess’s work is never done.
