Ice Princess

She was an ice princess. Not because she was cold, not at all. But she was perfectly beautiful in a crystalline way, and had a certain sharpness about her that made your senses tingle. Apparently, she made everyone's senses (and some other parts) tingle, too, but she never noticed. She was too busy being incredible, and, well, incredibly busy. Ice as she was, it seemed if she ever stopped going she'd melt.

I found her crying icicles into her April snowstorm. Pale and beautiful, though her eyes were turning red, I held her as her world shattered and let the sharp shards pierce me until the soft snow had silently covered over the cracks. I fell in love, and when I say I fell in love, I mean I fell head first into a waist-deep snowdrift of it. She and her icicle tears and windsong breath had given me a purpose, and as her world shattered, mine finally congealed. I wrapped her in something warm and black, not realizing she might melt.

And melt she did, I suppose. It was long and slow, but after almost two years of rocky adolescent love where I'd do anything for her, the thaw came with the worst possible timing. My ice princess became a real girl, vulnerable and soft, and I became a young woman, out to prove myself to the world at large, and myself. I wasn't there when she discovered her own flesh, sickly and pale. She found she had feelings, not just sparkling visions, and she began to scrape the mud off them.

Under layers of mud she found pain. It wasn't the kind of pain that could be silenced by an insulating layer of snow, either. My once-ice princess, now-girl was crying liquid tears like a storm and I had no idea what to do. I had only just learned to swim by myself after she had saved me from drowning. She was real and she needed me in a way so many people had so many times before, but this wasn't the way it was supposed to work. Fairy tales were only allowed one scary bit and we'd already had ours. As much as I had become the solid one, she was supposed to be ethereal, not broken and scared and human like everyone else.

And finally I'd realized what I could and couldn't do, that I couldn't save everyone like she had saved me. And this was a fracture a few encouraging kisses wouldn't heal. She needed time, and time was the only thing I couldn't give her. I left her in the care of old friends and new, because though her icy wings had fallen off, I was just about to finally fly.