Have you ever built a castle?

Truly, it’s not an easy question.  What even qualifies as a castle?  Most castle have ornate rooms of luxurious silk, lavish dining halls brimming with decadent meals, and detailed drawbridges over terrifying moats. After all, everything in a castle is a work of art.  The statues are of the finest Grecian marble.  The paintings depict beauty and pain in their most carnal forms, so you can’t even tell which is beauty and which is pain.  Maybe they’re the same.  Even the windows are of the richest stained glass that could outshine the sun on an overcast day.  Seemingly, all is perfect.  Perhaps the most important qualification that makes a manor a castle - dare I say the only requirement - is that royalty lives there.  Any hovel is a castle if a crown rests on a bedside table there every night.  And in this story, I am the queen of the castle.  After all, isn’t everyone the protagonist of his own tale?

To be a queen, I had to have a castle.  To have a castle, I had to be a queen.  Quite a conundrum.  While my crown was rather internal, confidence, poise, and drive are far more important than a silly golden headpiece.  (Silver is my preferred metal, anyway.)  Nevertheless, I became a queen, and over the years, I built the most breathtaking castle in the land.  Made of soaring crystal edifices and bountiful gardens of the most exotic flowers, it was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.  As the architect and ruler, I knew, of course, that there was always more work to be done, but I was still proud and pleased of the beautiful structures that were being expanded daily, thanks to my planning and effort. 

Even the most spectacular castle cannot satisfy a royal forever.  The length foyers and spacious rooms that once seemed comfortably large soon felt stifling in their emptiness.  A lonely queen can never truly build the most beautiful castle.  So, I set out to fill my castle with visitors, from commoners to overlords alike.  I met many who had crowns but were not truly royals before I met two you queens like myself.  We quickly grew close, bonding over similar visions of dreamy castles, as our works in progress grew with every breath we took.  My castle was filled with tinkling laughter intermixed with the thuds of construction.  It was beautiful music.  The sound warmed my soul and I danced for the first time in years.  Everything was good and light.  But as all stories go, goodness and light must give way to other things. 

Do you believe in a perfect utopia?  I could sometimes see it, just veiled glimpses, as if I was listening to a song but I could not place the words or where I first heard them.  Every time you think you have it, that lyric that seemed out of grasp, it seems to escape your fingers.  Sometimes the faintest touch is enough, for now, with the hope that it will stay tomorrow.  And sometimes that tomorrow doesn’t come, so you hope it’s the next day.  And the next.  And one day you wake up and you wonder what you were hoping for and how the present had rotted while you were praying for a future that will always stay in the future.

I don’t quite know when things soured.  Friendships don’t have expiration dates.  Fun afternoons are slowly marred by the occasional cutting comment, easily ignored at first.  Soon, sarcastic remarks lead to thinly veiled attacks, disguised in jokes, and a jealousy that cannot be ignored.  Looking back, I think we were a little too focused on building bright, shiny castles and filling them with bring, shiny things, instead of seeing the beauty and the pain in the places and the people and the everything that surrounded us.  Maybe I expected to much of them, and maybe they resented me.  Maybe we both made too many mistakes that led to this, the biggest being that when it didn’t meet our expectations and everything started falling, we didn’t fix it.  We quit, because what seems perfect should stay perfect, or it’s not worth another second. 

I believe that moments pass.  Sometimes you miss the sunrise, the guy has fallen in love with another girl, or the plane that was your escape plan leaves without you.  People grow scared and let the present slip by.  It happens.  I refuse to let it happen to us.  I don’t think we’ve missed our moment.  We need to lower our drawbridges, drain the moats, and remember why we started this in the first place.  We need to talk to each other like people, not like queens, not like architects, not as if we are already the future versions of us.  A castle, full of riches, success, and even a prince, is still an empty castle.  What is life without people, and music without dancing?  When did we get so caught up in the treasure hunt, the idea of finding treasure if we just soldier on, that we forgot what we were looking for and what treasure even looks like? 
I don’t have all the answers, and I certainly don’t have all the questions.  All I know is that for us, now is never too late to begin again.