Ivy-covered walls surround me and it would be an ivory tower were it not the prison of my youth. I dream of countless days and nights spent wandering the cavernous, shadowed halls, scurrying between the legs of giants, and accepting the limits of brick and marble. Those were lonely days.
When I met Kristina, I was pottering about in the gardens annoying the grounds crew. She was dressed all in white and told me, “Good boys ought not to play in the dirt.” Father had made me promise not to speak to the gardener’s daughter so I kept my mouth shut and squinted at her angrily. She looked like an angel reflecting the light of the sun, but I only had vague conceptions of what an angel was so I figured it’d be better not to mention it. I stomped off into the churchyard and she skipped along behind me with her arms behind her back.
My backwards glares did nothing to stop her advance and I began to sprint. I crashed through heavy oak doors and ran all the way up to the altar of the chapel. She walked cautiously up towards me and I clutched the railing for support. She took my hand and said, “This is the part where you say ‘I do’ and give me a shiny gold ring.”
I didn’t have a ring so I gave her a wooden figurine that my nanny had given me. It was covered in dirt; she made a fussy face and held it daintily with two fingers.
Then she gave me a maniacal smile and said, “Now, we’re married.”
I asked her to give me my toy soldier back the next day, said I didn’t want to be married, and broke my promise to my father. It was the first of many. She held out something scorched and broken into several pieces. She smirked when I didn’t take it. She rolled her eyes and shoved the pieces into my chest and kissed me on the lips. The charred wood left a black smudge on my heart that didn’t come out for days.
I refused to wear the shirt ever again. At the end of the summer the gardener moved to Glasgow, but sometimes I still see Kristina in my dreams. There, she’s dressed in black. She still hands me something scorched and broken, but in my dreams it is my heart.