for @merthurmicrofic prompt enemies, 507 words
You once asked how I, an unwashed peasant, came to write and read as well as a prince. I don’t remember what answer I gave, but I trust you know by now that snotty little brats are doomed to miserable lives full of unsolved mysteries. In respect to lessons hard learned, I’ll write the truth to you now.
The truth is that my mother taught me, and not because she had any great premonition of a future for me where such skills would be necessary. She learned herself in bits and pieces looking over her brothers’ shoulders and sneaking their books away for practice, and despite the hardships of my childhood, she persisted in the notion that, had I a bit more education and a sliver of the opportunity, I could sail it on to any sort of life I desired.
Strange, isn’t it, the hopes parents have for their children and the blood, sweat, and tears that go into building them. You face expectations far loftier than the dreamlike possibility architected for me, as befitting the difference in our stations. I know this. I know how heavily they’ve weighed on you and the strength it’s cost you to put them aside. Thank you for what you did that night. Whatever is to come, I will never forget that, in our darkest moment, you threw off every childhood lesson and acted on your heart alone.
Secretly I always knew you would. Oh how I love to be proven right.
In my lessons as a boy, my mother would read from a book of Greek tales. One of the fables in her book was of a dead king named Sisyphus, who was arrogant enough to trick death, and who was punished in eternity with the task to roll a boulder up a mountain. Only, every time the king approached the summit, the boulder would inevitably roll back down, forcing him to start again.
Sisyphus was doomed. He made his choices long ago, and in the end he toiled not to atone for his mortal sins, but in vain to beat the gods at their own games. ...It’s here my metaphor falls apart. I was moments from suggesting he might have prospered if he was only brave enough to change, to walk away from the fate that bound him, but I’m remembering now that he would have been flayed by winged women wielding whips if he’d tried.
Lucky for us we’re not in Hell, huh? At least not yet.
Writing to you as a free man, I hope you’ll forgive me if I place yet another expectation upon your worthy shoulders.
Write me back. I can’t give you an address—not in writing, you understand—but if you fold your letter into a boat and place it in the stream, the water will know where to go.
The next time we meet, the world may see us as enemies. But even if it makes me as arrogant as a mythological king who earned himself an eternal punishment, I’m not afraid at all.
I’ll be waiting.
Yrs faithfully,
M.
