There is a kind of woman who would, were your life spent in prison, decorate your cell with flowers and pillows and bright sayings cross-stitched and decorated—kittens and curlicues and outlined petals—framed in cheap plastic ovals or hung from plastic rods one and a half inches wide.
Maxims to cheer and give you fortitude in your ordeal.
She would be on the other side of the glass every time you had visitors and write you lovely letters scented delicately with the fragrance her own.
And that of a thousand other women.
The best leather edition of the one book inmates get to read would be her first gift to you; home-baked delicacies every remaining.
Marielle was not that woman.
In prison, she’d remind you of your sin and take pains to ensure you learned from it and overcame, all the while appearing to you in dreams at night of shadows and wrested from the place where joint and marrow divide sweetnesses you never knew you required and in the daylight, Liberty or some other goddess, rightly robed with a necessary tome in her left hand and the flag of eternal solitude wrapped around her bosom. Some symbolic virtue clasped in her right—not olive branch or torch but an object whose point needed to be explained and re-explained at great and enormous length.
A second flag, perhaps, held in the crook of her arm and waving behind her; one could never do with the mereness of the single banner.
Queen in exile, deposed and sorrowing.
A woman at odds with her environment and was that her fault or its own.
Out to ensure you did not rest in yours.
But did she see herself so.
There is a place where questions begin. The lifetime of it, then, every particle, every milli-second, every scrap of dust.
Relentless in the self-examining.
