The Queen of Nothing

The Queen is a lovely young lady, full of life and love and beauty. Her hands are capable of wonderful things and her mind is full of brilliant thoughts and her eyes are shining with unshed tears. She’s been living in a beautiful world full of color, but she’s drowning in the grey cloud surrounding her. Her body is gentle and loving, but her soul is gasping for air as it’s choked by an awkward silence. Her kingdom is built with pearls and pillars of gold, but she’s trapped in the dungeon and guarded by her insanity.

The air is cold. It's cold and it's angry. It's clawing and pulling at her hair and nibbling at the ends and it's whipping the strands in her face and letting it go. It's poking at her bare legs and raising tiny dots on her skin and making her wish she'd gone with the dark jeans hanging in her closet instead of the shorts she has on now. She pulls at the grey jacket covering her torso, hoping maybe she can bring it closer to her and somehow that will warm her cold heart. It doesn't.

The trees are dancing. They're swaying and clapping to the click-click-click of her shoes hitting the rocky pathway that’s weaving through the park. It's not really in the park, though; it's trailing away from it and through bits of grass by the gazebo. There are benches placed next to the path and there are patches of flowers growing in the miniature fields and there are trees on the edge of the area, separating it from whatever's on the other side.

At the far end of the area, hidden away by the trees, is a picnic bench, probably used for barbeques at one point. No one ever goes there anymore, not that she’s seen, at least. And that's why she goes there, why she’s claimed it as her own. No one ever walks through the grass to get to the table; they just walk by on the winding path and pretend it's not there. But not her. No, she pretends the rest of the windy, green area doesn't exist. She walks through it and puts her bag down and pushes herself onto the table and sits down. She folds her legs and places them atop each other and rests her hands on the wood beneath her. She looks at the grass and the path and the flowers and the benches and the people pretending she’s not there and she sighs. This is her kingdom; she’s got nothing more. She’s got nothing at all.

She pulls her music player out of her bag and puts in her headphones and turns up the volume. She lets the drums pick up her heart beat and the bass fill her lungs and the guitar rush through her veins and the words weave through her hair. She closes her eyes and breathes in. She opens her eyes and breathes out.

The Queen is anything but royalty. She’s got a family of insomniacs, a house full of insanity, and a mind full of disaster. Her only escape is her kingdom, and she can’t even see it clearly through her teary eyes. She knows she has little, but it’s still more than she deserves and she tries to be grateful for it all, but she can’t. She can’t push her way through the dark and is trapped with only a flickering night-light.

The Queen swallows the lump growing in her throat and rises from her place on her throne. She steps onto the green floor and walks off onto the rocky pathway. The click-click-click of her shoes is too loud in the silence of the fresh night. She keeps walking, though, and soon finds herself at the door of her dungeon. She breathes in her last bit of the kingdom and steps into her house. She closes the door behind her and accepts that she may never see the pearls and gold of her kingdom clearly. She lets go of the breath she’d been savoring with a sigh and hopes that maybe she won’t always be this way. Maybe she won’t always be queen. The Queen of Nothing.