From Ophelia’s Perspective

The weight of my once dry clothes pull against the ghostly pale of my skin, sinking me deeper and further from the light of the world that has now grown dark. My lungs no longer search for the air that prolonged this hallowed body of mine to exist in such sorrow; and I am at rest.

I have no fear of the deafening waters,
for the songs that once escaped my youthful lips are still a sound that soothe me to sleep. My feet begin to sink and my toes are welcomed into the sand where I am no longer floating in his
reckoning.

I’m weightless with every step I take towards a light far whiter than the dress I once saw myself wearing
for him, and I begin to walk down the aisle I thought one day would lead me to our promise of faithfulness.

The hands that used to hold a broken man together,
now gather a bouquet arranged for none other than myself.
A daisy for the innocence he took advantage of,
that he tore from my untainted hands.
A crocus for the youth of a soul,
a soul that knew no better than to continuously
devote herself to much less than a stone.
A snowdrop for the hope that kept an ignorant child tethered to him,
when everyone else told that child to let go.
A jonquil for the aching desire
that he would love my heart as I did his.
An aloe, the final flower, that rested in the heart of the bouquet,
that mirrored the grief each flower had brought me to.
The grief that drowned my lungs,
the grief that tainted my innocence,
aged my girlish heart,
cut every string of hope, every cry for joy, every last breath from my lungs.

I realize these flowers are a gift from none other than the man himself, and the grief that brought me
down this aisle, strikes my hands as if the flowers had bitten them with poison.
I drop the bouquet into the sand, with my knees falling beside them;
Until a hand much bigger than mine,
with veins of a strong man, but the grip of a warm heart,
picks the bouquet up slow enough for my eyes to follow.
They trail their way up to the glowing figure of my late father,
a joy he too took from me,
and I realize the aisle was never a trail that my father would lead me down towards a man,
but for a man to lead me down towards my father.