It isn't the story she had intended to be telling, it's just that all of these stories are so entangled, overlapping; half a dozen asides that she's already said could have been whole tales in their own right. The intersecting places where it's sort of unavoidable context to everything else, the immense way that the landscape of not only her life but many others had been changed—
“My mothers gave up so much for me to be my father's daughter,” she says. And the sacrifice that she always remembers first is their fucking dignity, Anne alone at the end with the girl who could not will herself hers, Guenievre whose voice slips away in memory because she had heard it so rarely only to die with an arrow in her throat— “and everything they had given it up for had slipped through my fingers.”
She doesn't say: I felt as if I'd failed. Does she need to?
“My aunt remade me, I think. Or unmade me, so I could do it. So many people here have never known me other than as I am, but I thought it would kill me to even try. I didn't know it was love, when I was railing at her. All the years I'd spent trying to be my mothers' daughter,” and failing, and failing, and failing, “she asked me over and over and fucking over again, who is holding the knife? and eventually I understood that I could do something with it.”
Metaphorically.
Also, literally. It's amazing how many problems can be solved by stabbing someone if you specifically look for that kind of problem.
“I could make the sacrifice worth something. A different way.”
And— hers, too, maybe. (But this story has to have a happy ending. It ends at the door of the cottage, and not inside.)
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It isn't the story she had intended to be telling, it's just that all of these stories are so entangled, overlapping; half a dozen asides that she's already said could have been whole tales in their own right. The intersecting places where it's sort of unavoidable context to everything else, the immense way that the landscape of not only her life but many others had been changed—
“My mothers gave up so much for me to be my father's daughter,” she says. And the sacrifice that she always remembers first is their fucking dignity, Anne alone at the end with the girl who could not will herself hers, Guenievre whose voice slips away in memory because she had heard it so rarely only to die with an arrow in her throat— “and everything they had given it up for had slipped through my fingers.”
She doesn't say: I felt as if I'd failed. Does she need to?
“My aunt remade me, I think. Or unmade me, so I could do it. So many people here have never known me other than as I am, but I thought it would kill me to even try. I didn't know it was love, when I was railing at her. All the years I'd spent trying to be my mothers' daughter,” and failing, and failing, and failing, “she asked me over and over and fucking over again, who is holding the knife? and eventually I understood that I could do something with it.”
Metaphorically.
Also, literally. It's amazing how many problems can be solved by stabbing someone if you specifically look for that kind of problem.
“I could make the sacrifice worth something. A different way.”
And— hers, too, maybe. (But this story has to have a happy ending. It ends at the door of the cottage, and not inside.)