Wishes and Wanderlust

Kladie knew the mountains as if they were her own form,

dusted brown in the summer and paled in the winter,

and she would look to them every night outside her window,

wondering if she would ever see a different landscape

beyond the one she had seen all the days of her life.

The sun painted shadows of pink and gray, all so near

that she could have reached out a hand as if to grasp them,

but those lofty peaks were so far away that they were like illusions

that made her dreams heavy with clouds and fog and mirrored lakes.

Her grandmother had once murmured that Kladie was like a bird,

so easily ruffled and born to reach greater and greater heights,

but the village was like a small cage that would stifle her.

But daughters were not supposed to be adventurers, not now,

not in an age where songs were still sung of only kings.

In dreams, Kladie ran through fields of gold and hopped

into the air as invisible wings gave her body flight,

but she wished there would come a day when reality

bore some of that same vibrancy and color too.

But the years grew long for Kladie, as wishful girls often waited,

and she saw the passing of her grandmother and her father

until the day she was the only one of her sisters left to wed.

Her mother wound beads into the plaits of Kladie's hair

and took her out by moonlight to bask in its radiance,

but Kladie's eyes burned with tears because she knew

marriage would only seek to restrain her more and more.

The day she was to be bound to the village elder,

Kladie ran as fast as she could by the waking light,

and the trees weaved their branches around her as she fled,

welcoming her more deeply into their protective embrace,

until no one could even see the forest that had been,

the very same that had edged the mountains' base.

The elder, the mother, and the sisters forgot her name

until she was just a legend spoken on the tongues

of the girls who wished enough that their dreams

bore fruit that never died and lives that never wept.

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