Fickle.
I live behind the most beautiful girl in the world. It sounds cliché, I know, like the overworked, tired plot of some romance story, but it’s true. When she was born, all the stars crowded into her nursery and decided to give her a gift.
Her father had done them a good turn, you see. When a particularly violent meteor storm shower crashed through their ranks, he bandaged their wounds, helped them repair their manor houses. He even carved Draco a new tail out of driftwood after the first was sheared off by a comet’s tail and smashed into stardust.
The stars, forever grateful, had offered him riches, fame, a place among them. He declined, replying that he was happy with the life he led. When his daughter was born, however, they insisted on granting her some boon.
They arrived en masse, star after shooting star zooming through her open window until such a glow shone from her windows that to stare at it was to stare at the sun. They spent hours there, debating and discussing and deciding on the perfect gift. But the stars are old beings with antiquated ideas and outdated practices. More than that, the stars are vain, and so they gave her the gift of beauty, the kind that can’t be found on Earth, only among the heavens.
I was there that day, standing on the grass looking at her window. I don’t remember much—I was but a handful of years old—but the glow, the beautiful, fearsome glow is something I can never forget.
My father was their stable keeper, but when they got a fancy new horseless carriage he retired. I was to take over his job, but without horses—they sold the last of them to transform the stable into a garage—I took on the gardening duties instead. My mother, while not their gardener, was an avid one with the greenest thumb you can imagine. She had taught me much over the years, and I was glad to put the skills to use.
With the job came a cottage, a small house with a single bedroom and a closet-sized kitchen. It sat on the fringes of their lawn—a large green carpet that was both my pride and joy and their makeshift croquet court. It was their space to sit, wander, and enjoy a bit of green. From the small window in my matchbox-kitchen, I had a view that most young men would offer up an arm, a leg, and their month’s wages for. From my window, I could see straight up to her room.
The years had passed, and the cradle was replaced with a regally-robed pillow of a bed, the mobiles had been exchanged for embroidered tapestries, and the baby for a beautiful young woman. With each year, her beauty grew and grew. The good looks the stars had bestowed upon her ripened into fruition, and there could be no doubt that such beauty came from somewhere other than this world, but the charm and wit and cleverness was entirely her own.
Each night she would sit on her windowsill and unfold a delicate leather book: her diary. All the while she would steal a glance out of her window, perhaps at the stars, perhaps at the lights of the nearby village. It wasn’t long after her seventeenth birthday that she confided in me that my name appeared in her book. Not long after, I learned that the stolen glances from her window found their way to my cottage, hoping to catch sight of my face.
The hints did not go misunderstood. I had, entirely unwittingly, won the favor of the most beautiful girl in the world. But whether she wanted me to toss rocks at her window, arrange secret midnight meetings to serenade her, set off to seek my fortune, or propose to her immediately, I didn’t quite know. It didn’t much matter to me.
While all the young men of the village—the farmer’s son, the cobbler’s apprentice, the stable boy at the mayor’s mansion, and everybody in between—crept onto the property to try to catch glimpses of her window, or tired to greet her as she strolled along the river, or tired to help her home when she went into the village for groceries, while they all sought her favor, I had won it. All the while, I had no interest in possessing it whatsoever.
Her face was beautiful, beautiful like the stars’ glow that night years ago, but it stirred within me no rosy bud of romance, no sense of longing, no stirrings within me. Her glances out the window did not inspire the kind of giddy exuberance that it would in my peers.
She approached me one day, cornering me in crevice corner between two rose bushes. The blooms were just starting to stick out their heads from their furry emerald helmets. Caught between the greenery and her glass features, in the cloud of the roses’ perfume and her lavender scent, I paused, knowing I would not escape without hearing her words.
Her words were as blunt as her features were fine. She argued that it would be like fate, that I could be the farm boy in the fairy tales, setting out to seek my fortune and win the heart of my one true love. I reminded her that I was no farm boy and that to say otherwise would be to lie to fate itself. As she looked for the words to say next, I slipped away to tend to the lawn.
When I returned to my cottage, I could have sworn that the small black cat— the one that liked to slink around the baseboards, looking for the mice that liked to tremble across the worn planks of my kitchen floor—was watching me with doubt, as if wondering how I could deny my fortune. I only shrugged at it in reply.
The next week a basket of fresh fruit was left on my doorstep. An envelope was tucked between a bunch of grapes that were so succulent they were nearly bursting on their own and an apple with skin as dark as sin and flesh as white as a dove. It contained a carefully folded poem, with words so beautiful that even the most arrogant scholars couldn’t deny its craft. It was clearly her hand, and her words, and her thoughts and she begged me to consider the ties of fate, the way that our stories had arced together, the way they would continue to do so.
I tucked the note into a book of romantic poetry, one of the only volumes that found a home in my cottage. My mother took the fruit and baked it into a galette for a village celebration. I found the poem many years later and smiled at the childhood folly of the memory.
The next week I bumped into her, most literally, on a visit to the village store. I, on my way out, she on her way in. When she asked for my help in carrying back her load I took up a basket and set my pace beside her.
She wove the way back with words of destiny, of soulmates, of love, until each step was another twist of the shuttle across a loom. I said nothing in reply; to make a tear in a piece of beautiful art is a crime in itself, but once the load was laid in the kitchen of the large house I bowed my head slightly and took my leave.
This was the form my life took, and, in the nooks and crannies of my mind, I think I almost began to wonder if fate was driving me to her and her to me. Until one night, she wasn’t peering from her window down at mine. She wasn’t coming into the grocery store as I left. She wasn’t leaving tokens on my stoop. She had found another lover—adventure itself—and left on a passing ship to see the world.
I think of her sometimes and smile. I hear tales of a beautiful woman climbing the Alps, or sailing down the rivers of China, or standing among the dunes of the Sahara, and wonder if it is she, the one who courted me so insistently. I hear and I wonder if she was wrong about fate the whole time, if it is as real as a puff of smoke is tangible. Or perhaps she was right, and fate is merely more fickle than she anticipated. Perhaps fate changed its mind.