Derelict

She is feared more than she is worshipped, like all queens of all empires. They flee from her in the corridors of the palace, they adorn their hair in mimicry adulation, they sashay their hips and pout their lips and powder their faces and patiently await her choice of pastime to pursue.

Her face is a mythic anomaly. Never is there a misplaced freckle, an askew hair strand, an incensed pustule, an arid iota of skin. She lords over her minions with panache. She devises their every move. They are her dirty fingers to which she assigns her methods of trivial destruction. Every servant must know its place. Every disciple must abide by the designed rules of her fabricated kingdom.

Her kingdom will not last forever.

She will be forced to leave it one day, with the ceremonial passing of the tassel to the other side.

She will be banished from her own kingdom and forced to live under the rule of another.

Other queens will rise in her absence. The vicious cycle will continue.

The people must be led.

***

She has kept her body untainted through the years of her reign. Now she overcompensates for her inexperience, cultivating her kissing techniques in darkened alleys and squandering her innocence in the backseat of a car.

She works mediocre jobs for menial pay and saves for a rainy day. The rainy day never comes so she fritters it away on garments and God alone knows. Whatever the bejeweled bringer of joy puts in the brown bag he slips into her hand when he feigns to hug her.

Her minions are long gone, matured into their own human husks and imbued with a sense of purposelessness they will lucratively mask from their mates and offspring behind maternal smiles and clichéd stereotypes of femininity. They married for bodily nocturnal warmth. Anything to stave off the memories of the frigid futility of their childhood and the emptiness in her empirical eyes.

She crosses paths with them on occasion, and simulates industriousness to escape their inquisitive unveiled eyes. They have found something or someone to replace their vacuity, but she is still alone on her derelict throne, flaunting her discolored crown.

***

She does not age well. She stands before mirrors after her daily cleansing, revolted by the pale, voluminous, slack skin.

She gets her tubes tied before her thirty-fifth birthday to save money on contraceptive and preemptory measures. She drinks herself into oblivion one time too many and finds herself in rooms she doesn’t remember entering, with men whose names she never learnt, and a fistful of bills in the pockets of her discarded attire dispersed on the grimy floor.

She finds salvation in a little brown bag, in a little white pill, in a little green bottle.

She is not really living. She is the cumulative carcass of the former glamour queen, the dreaded evil emperor of the halls.

She is the weary-eyed woman behind the cash register at the local drugstore. She is the wretched unkempt girl sitting next to you on the bus. She is a little bit of me, a little bit of you. She is the heart afraid of breaking that never took the chance.

Don’t envy her.