Disclaimer: Still haven't managed to convince anyone to let me own Wicked.
- x -
She writes.
At first, every week. Then, every month. Every year.
The lack of response – only mildly surprising, even at first, when her heart was swollen with childish hope and that absolute love she'd painfully come to embrace – stopped being a blow after a while. She had no address for her. The words she curled onto crisp envelopes were guesses, the letters tinged with a sadness which did not dull with the years.
After a little while, she stops aiming – the idea that someone else, someone other than the intended recipient, was reading her words becomes overwhelming – and the letter simply proclaims 'The Emerald City'.
It might have been the world itself.
It is only with these letters that she licks the envelope, and only with these letters that the official seal of golden wax, the ridiculous acknowledgement of her acquired superiority, is bypassed.
There is nothing remarkable about them, nothing which would make a passer-by stop with the realisation of its origin. Nothing but the handwriting only she would recognise, and the words between the words where she hasn't the courage to write them. Just like she never had the courage to say them.
She wishes she had. For love, that was dangerous and thrilling, and maybe it would have changed things.
Perhaps it is silly, but she cannot quite relinquish that tiny remaining shade of the trembling hope she'd once had. Nor does she truly want to. She could be walking the streets of the City, blended, eyes low and quick, and one of them might catch her eye. She might find one and read one and realise, finally realise, that she has not forgotten about her. That she is still waiting.
- x -
Sometimes, she wishes she lived in a world where wrinkles don't tug at the corners of her eyes, where her golden hair is not infiltrated by the silver strand, where that feeling in her stomach can still be identified. For she is sure that the hope died, should've died, a long time ago, when it was revealed that the Witch had been slain by the farm-girl.
Yet she writes, not willing to accept her death, or perhaps not willing to believe it.
The feeling from all those years ago is still clear and burning and broken, and so, can she truly be dead? Damaged, shattered maybe, but not dead. It does not make sense for it to be so; that flicker is still there, refusing to be extinguished with any number of glittering gowns and sweet perfumes.
When the ring is placed on her left hand several letters after the news which isn't quite as earth-shattering as it, perhaps, should have been, she expects it to disappear. That emptiness and the pulsing, the wholeness and numb… these should have abandoned her. She vows herself to another, promises to be with him for the remainder of her life despite the way it makes her skin crawl, and she cannot be both. She cannot be his wife and be her soul.
But there is no epiphany, no shift. Just ink stains on her gleaming wedding ring.
- x -
She refers to her with the long-dead nickname and signs, simply, with her first name. It has been years, and she finds that the fear of being traced never even crosses her mind anymore. Age and despair, an existence without her, has made her hard and reckless, far too late.
Every night, as she lays an outstretched arm and a world away from her husband and vaguely wonders when his heart will finally fail him, she considers what might have been. Had she dismounted the carriage instead of trying to coax her inside. Had she succeeded in returning her to Shiz.
She considers how things would be the same and how they would be different.
She considers how much paper and ink and words she would have saved.