The Year We Fell In Love While The World Kept Spinning Around Us

Photo by Vincent Camacho on Unsplash

It was the year of pin-pricked fingers. Of watching storybook boys try to pick apart the lock of her powdered-rose-petal lips from afar, only to end up falling asleep faster than they learned how to wield their shiny swords. Of shedding my snarl for smirk for smile as soon as our lips brushed and frozen raindrop sleet eyes filled my vision.

“Didn’t know you still remembered how to do that, princess,” I said as I watched the way she brushed her bird-bone fingers over her crescent moon mouth, which slowly curled up into a million-watt smile as soon as she caught sight of my kohl-lined eyes and Marlboro red lips.

“Want to show me again?”

Ever since I first saw her, I wanted to pick her apart and put her back together — Princess Aurora, with her snow-pellet soft skin, luscious locks spun from stolen twilight, and yearning tucked in the palms of her soft, unscarred hands. She was the ruby-red apple dipped in poison, the sweet sound of siren songs luring lovestruck sailors right before they sunk their ships. She was the temptation you weren’t aware you wanted until you’d already been bewitched by it, only to be left with outstretched hands and a hollow heartbeat as you watched the way she walked alongside picture-perfect Prince Charmings, Pinocchios, but never you. She was everything I wasn’t supposed to want and wanted anyway.

The entire kingdom succumbed to slumber the instant she pricked her finger, but I was gone long before that. I yearned to see the world, wanted to kiss the boys and make them die.

But now I had returned and I’d done what no knight or prince had managed before me: found her fragile and drowning in sleep, falling into the spaces between the breaths. When I kissed her, I watched the way her silver eyes slowly fluttered open, felt her plush lips curl up into a spellbinding smile as soon as she realized who I was. That was the first thing she saw when she woke. My eyes, all pine tree, hope, and bottle green, my wolfish grin, the safest possible danger.

It was the year of teaching her how to trade candy pink gauze gowns for sundae-spotted t-shirts. Of slicing strand after strand of her cornsilk curls until her features were sharper than Cheshire, until she was no longer the hunger but the huntress. The year of watching her ditch her perfect posture for time spent slouched over tawny tree stumps as we smoked all the cigarettes she was never allowed to touch, kissed until I no longer knew where I ended and where she began. With the boys bundled in the soft blanket of sleep, our bodies were no longer blazing hellfires but hearths. Love was something warm and wild, a flickering flame we kept cupped in our palms lest it die out and leave embers in its wake.

Two girls are in love and this is their downfall. Or: two girls are in love and this is their salvation. The year of affection, autonomy, and awakening. The year of realizing that being a girl doesn’t have to mean being a dandelion, granting wish after wish for everyone that isn’t you, doesn’t have to mean that you have to shed your innocence like rattlesnake scales, slither into boys’ chambers and learn how to stuff your raspberry pink tongue down a boy’s throat to be loved. To be seen as something valuable, acceptable, normal. Sometimes she is deadly nightshade. Sometimes she eats boys’ hearts with a side of fries and kisses a girl right after until the only thing she can taste on her lips is strawberry-cinnamon chapstick and bubblegum. Sometimes you find her amidst the forest she created in slumber, the forest you never should have been able to slice to pieces, and you kiss the life back into her and all at once, she’s awake, you’re the lover instead of the fighter, you know the language of becoming.

The year when everyone we’d once known was stuck in stasis — our first kiss (true love’s kiss, though we never called it that, left subjects like love and rebellion unspoken between us) might have woken her up, but her parents, courtiers, nursemaids, suitors, the peasants, teachers, doctors, and army remained swaddled in stillness. A love-tainted year. The year our hourglass hips swayed to melodies only we could hear, kept one another like promises, touched until we memorized every crack and crevice that covered our hollow bodies.

The year of popcorn-greased fingers and blue raspberry slushee stains, of “there’s nothing better than kissing at the top of the ferris wheel, princess,” of “teach me everything you know,” and “you’ll never feel your heart beat this fast ever again.” When I heard the sound of her twinkling laughter as we rode the tilt-a-whirl, her quicksilver eyes full of smoke and sparkle, I clutched onto her bony fingers as soon as the ride ended and peppered kisses all over her flushed face until she could hear every single “I love you” I’ve never said.

We could have spent the rest of our lives in a vacant kingdom, watching the thicket of thorns grow thicker with every passing day – and she wanted to, was set on it initially – but I talked her out of it with my careless hands and razor-sharp smile. So we snuck into her crumbling castle, and I helped her turn into a wild thing, just as she had turned her kingdom into one. Or perhaps she was never wild; perhaps it was just that I finally had her in the palms of my hands and could do everything I wanted with the princess, with no one around to force us to follow any rules. Maybe love made us both a little drunk on our recklessness. Maybe the branches and the brambles made us wicked, or maybe they made us holy. We knew so many symphonies and none of them were set to music.

For all the rest of the world knew, she was asleep with the rest of her kingdom, nestled between twigs and twine, just a timeless tale for foolish princes to dream of saving. For all they knew, she was delicate and quiet; she was glass apology, all bird-bones and skin drained from the stars, on the precipice of salvation. For all they knew, she could still be seen as something lovely.

The only trace we left behind was our initials carved into the flesh of every tree we kissed under. The only ones that knew we were once there were the trees and the wind, but our secrets were safe with them. The year of wilderness and want, of discovering a thousand-year-old car that smells like the very opening of the world and driving down rocky roads without a destination in mind. Everything blameless and beautiful and bright.

It’s not what the faeries wanted for her, not the road they imagined she’d one day pave with her own soft hands when they bestowed their gifts upon her at birth – beauty, strength, grace, and wonder. All tender, rabbit-soft things, gifts fit for a princess, better than anything her tutors could have taught her. But the faeries didn’t realize they were giving her the gift of the world, didn’t realize it wouldn’t be the sweet taste of Prince Charming’s kisses that woke her, but the kisses of a blazing girl, a girl sharper than a razor, gun before the firing. They didn’t realize we would make our own home under the pinwheeled sky of open-lettered stars, one realer than any picture-perfect kingdom that came before it.

The year of embracing our girlhood, all soft, gape-mouthed mirror faces, and brittle backbones. The year where we won the world at every carnival we went to. The year of discovery, devotion, and driving. Hands learning how to spin the stars on our fingernails.

Here: the year of becoming women without having to become weapons.

All spindly-limbed stained-glass saints. Angels made from the sewing machine. Touching like life could bloom from our fingertips.

Artist Statement:

Ever since childhood, I have always been fascinated by fairy-tales and their intricacies. For this particular piece, I chose to reimagine Sleeping Beauty in a queer context, where instead of being woken up by Prince Charming, Princess Aurora wakes from the kiss of a girl who is Aurora’s antithesis: with dark-rimmed doe eyes, leather-clad shoulders, and a smile like a promise or a warning all at once, this bad luck girl shouldn’t capture Aurora’s attention. Yet she does, for Aurora has always been in love with her even though she knew their love would never come to fruition. However, this love flourishes when this girl returns to the kingdom she once deserted after traveling the world to find herself and kisses the life back into Aurora, allowing them to live out their love and for Aurora to discover who she truly is when she isn’t carrying society’s expectations on her shoulders.

Author Bio:

Luna Vallejo is a writer who hails from New York. A New York City Youth Poet Laureate finalist, her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and literary magazines such as Kalopsia Lit and Moonflake Press. When she is not writing, you can find her dissecting song lyrics, re-reading her favorite novels, and collecting vinyl records.