Cut the strings and set me free

Part 2- threads that entangle

And when our hands later compliantly slide rings onto each other's fingers in the presence and visible eyes of the world we were trapped in, I saw in his eyes a part of him shutter and fade. Eyes becoming emotionless chips of oak brown. Eyes that became just like a doll's. Blank and vacant and unseeing.

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"Get it off. I want it off." I say, breaths coming out wheezy and forced, fingers scrabbling to try and tear the layers off me, choking back a hysterical sob when the clothes don't fall away under my touch, don't vanish until I'm clawing at skin.

"Please wait Your Highness." One of the ladies says, trying to be soft and gentle with her soothing voice, her hands gently clutching mine and drawing them away.

"Take it off. I don't want it. I don't want this, any of this." I sob, finally letting the tears fall in the privacy and secrecy of my chambers, kohl lined eyes streaming, leaving black trails in their wake.

"I'm sorry Your Highness. So, so, sorry." The lady says, voice gentle and when I peer up into her eyes I see sympathy flicker there in her soft hazel eyes, understanding and pity and grief on her features, someone sharing in the pain with me.

But does she know? Does she know how it feels to slowly die and wither away inside? To sign away your life with one word? To feel one small piece of jewellery slide onto a finger and feel heavier and more burdensome than the world's heaviest weights, the worst shackle that could be forced on anyone?

And yet did I not accept it?

Did I not extend my hand and allow the glove to be drawn off my hand and a large warm hand hold mine, equally burdened, equally trapped as he bound me to him. As he publicly adorned me with a stamp of his ownership.

I had signed my life away. I had done it.

And yet my heart aches, tears itself apart with agony that maybe just maybe things would've been different if I had been alive in a different world, at a different time in a different place. Maybe my life wouldn't be this unravelled, knotted and weaved into such an intricately weaved web if my father hadn't died. And silently I rue myself, curse myself for being born to such a fate.

Where my life wasn't truly my own.

Where the glittering simplistic jewelled band around my finger so easily became the noose around my neck, tightening until I could no longer breathe.

And the air that rushes into my lungs when the layers are stripped away and the corset unlaced is sudden and cold and sharp, knees buckling as I sink to the ground, hands fisting into the gaudy fabric and trembling.

"Leave." I whisper when hands come to draw me up, tugging my arms out of their grips.

"Your Highness you need to let us finish undressing you." one of the ladies said, voice level and cool and still professionally maintained. Unaffected.

But I've long gone past the point of caring. If I can't shatter and cry and dissolve in my own chambers, did I have a place I could ever escape? Would I be trapped within my mind, caged in and prisoner to my thoughts?

"ENOUGH! You are all to leave my chambers, I am not to be disturbed. There is no need for any of you to appear when dawn breaks and morrow rises. I do not require assistance. Now leave...please." I say, that band of control finally snapping, all my hurt seeping out, fingers digging into my arms, and the taught authority of commanding a room, of giving orders sliding into place.

I don't recognise the cold, pained shrieks. Don't recognise anything human in them. Because maybe I'm long past that point, humans feel and I've been taught not to. So maybe I never truly had been human. Not since the moment where my father's death had been the day I too had died. Where a part of me was killed and separated from me and the rest of me to live in suffocation under my mother's icy reign. She had been the warmth of a welcoming hearth for me, her arms safe and secure and always open. But now she was the unforgiving figure carved from stone, expression unchanging and heart never softening, never thawing. I couldn't recognise her anymore.