JULIET / ROSALINE / OBERON
:: JULIET: What isyour favourite luxury?
once upon a time – thatwas how a part of Vivianne wishes to reply. for it had, indeed, been once upon a time that a plethora ofthose had found themselves attached to her name. when the attachment of herlast to her first had not changed everything about her circumstances. it hadbeen once upon a time, for a briefmoment in time, before the world, her world,had come crashing down on her lonely, throbbing head, and left it split openfor all of her idealisation and fantasies, that she had not yet known betterthan to let get inside to begin with, come gushing back out of it. yet, thephrase seemed to be reserved for things reminiscent of faerie-tale grandeur, andthis woman had no part in such a thing. the pages of thick with imagination-richsplendour were not a place for her time-wearied bones to rest; her place hadbeen made, and by her own hand, in reality.once upon time was aretrospective thought that remained idling in the past she refused to let wrapits hand around her throat.
luxury? there was no room for it in Vivianne’s life. “I do notwaste my time with such things,” she says. Ihave not in a long, long while, she does not.
:: ROSALINE: Whichpeople from your past haunt you?
there had been a time in herlife, long ago, when the woman might have narrowed her eyes and said, indignantand stalwart and bristling with ire, “nothing.”and would have thought it the truth, even. but time has taught Vivianne betterthan that. and the ghosts which she carries wherever she goes, awake or asleepor in-between, and those have proven – far too relentless, as a thing must be to make an impression on her at all,to be shaken off. more tangible than she herself was, was all that haunted her.
ithas cost her, she cannot deny to herself, having to face that the man and womanwho made her, and raised her, and ruined her long before she had turned that ruination into armour todon into the battle her life quickly turned into when everything of hers was only that which she earned for herself –that their voices, digging blunt nails into her innards in attempts to gougeout & wrestle away just one more piece of her, just a little more of whatwould never be enough, and never to be forgiven – those voices would be insideof her head forever. that even gone, they went nowhere. that the girl she was nomore, who she left behind, would be aghost in lingering with shadows in the back of every room she gazed upon herreflection in.
which people from your past haunt you? she could laugh. tired andmirthless and like shards of glass littering the walls of her throat. butVivianne was not capable, and so, her version of it is to allow a corner of hermouth to rise an infinitesimal fraction, a brief peak before it vanishes behindher words.
“too many,” comes the confession.
:: OBERON: Doesreputation matter to you?
“yes,” Vivianne replies withoutpreamble.
this, she needs not ponder or strategizeabout. it is a part of the woman that she knows herself to be. “in the eyes ofthose who matter to me, my reputation in their eyes does matter.” she thinks ofCosimo. of the man who offered her protection when there was no roof to trembleaway underneath, when the storm of her life wreaked havoc. when calamitystruck. when she had been left alone, left to fend for herself, and when hername was a punch-line in publications and there was nothing to her but thatvery same tarnished name – that Cosimo Capulet had allowed her the opportunityto resurrect; only then had her name been forged anew, as had all else abouther.
of course it matters to her.
