Sometimes it is anguish, the feeling that I have to keep learning the same lessons over and over, the wail of despair, the whywhywhy, the gut punch of it. I will never be any good at this, I will never be any good, and I want to smash my body into a wall, my clumsy hands into pulp, it just seems pointless to keep trying. I'm right back to dancing with myself, slowly, and it's horrible. 

And sometimes it is just exasperating, to see in my mind who I want to be and yet not become that person. I say to my heart: rave on! But my heart can barely pull at the right strings. Thick fingers and tongue fumbling lost and hopeless, my mouth that cannot form the words, not even nonsense words and sleeping lions; at best I will only ever be able to articulate exactly what I am doing, which lacks poetry. 

But sometimes, sometimes, blessed, I realize that while I am not who I want to be, I am getting better, stronger, that same lesson over again is awful but it snaps into place faster, the rhythm is better, and I can even sing a radio war, the missed chord shorter and I keep on playing, I play right past it. 

Cassandra sits in a rocking chair in a large, circular room. It has the slightly stale air of a room rarely visited. The sunlight filters down through the skylights; dust motes dance in the sunbeams. The shelves are lined with mementos, and fingerprints in the dust show which ones have been recently looked at: the wooden mask of a monkey, a perfume bottle, a puzzle box, shells and stones collected from the beach, an urn. There are books on the shelf, too: poetry, some prose, all thumbed at the edges, stains of red wine and coffee, marginalia. One book full of little scraps of paper that fly out from the pages and scatter across the floor when you open it. What was marked? It doesn't matter. Cassandra rocks in her chair and the creak on the wooden floor says what she is tired of saying, hates to say: Told you so, told you so, told you so.  

The moat the drawbridge the tower the turret the little holes where the archers peek out… you know, the usual castle features. You can embellish it up, make it a superfancy metaphor, where the moat is your tears and the turret is where you hide your fragile heart and the archers are, oh I don't know, those catty asides, sarcastic barbs, your explosions of wit and cruelty. High walls, one assumes, well defended and whatnot, not to be scaled by the cowardly. Also vines from years of neglect. 

Everybody wants a castle and by everybody I mean you. You wanted a castle, you built it, you carried in the cold smooth stones and fixed them into place; the fortress the buttress and you the mistress. Walking the ramparts, then. Surveying. Taking the measure. Games of strategy in the throne room and needlepoint by candlelight. Remembering all the stories you once knew.

Well that's all very fine but what now? You should probably have a conflict of some sort. You can't have a story without a conflict. You can't have a conflict until you lower the drawbridge. You had thought you wanted a wonky spell cast upon the walls: nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out, except that gets boring after a while. Perhaps a horse of the trojan variety or maybe some circus performers could come by. A bard, singing songs of other castles, everybody likes a little peek at the neighbors and if the wandering minstrel (wandering minstrel!) beds the queen at night well that just livens up the tapestry a little, doesn't it.

Of course there is a part of you that is frightened; not everybody comes out of every story alive. Digging your nails into the rough wooden underside of the banquet table to stay calm; the shadows of strangers against the walls turn into monsters by firelight and pebbles have been carelessly skipped across the moat as if it doesn't hold the history of a thousand sadnesses. It's still okay though; you wanted a story and now you are getting one. Quick, look or you might miss something. 

It is difficult to have deliberately chosen to be a certain way because it is easy and then wonder if perhaps you shouldn't have chosen a different way, or no way at all. To have chosen to stop tasting the foods that make you sick, and then wonder when standing at a table laden with meat whether you really really didn't like it or if you just decided at some point to stop wanting it.