I can't put myself into my work just yet. There are too many things lingering around me. I am thinking of the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and my poor heart is taken with sensibility for my sixteenth year. It is one decade since, and perhaps that is why sixteen has been so much with me the past few months. I am not longing for the past, but I want sunlight and long moments to dream as I did then. I will work, because I know there is no other agreeable path to noon and Lucrece, but I am dying a little with this longing for high passion and reverie. Shelley, you are not far from me nor are my other dreams. You are the merest thought, just a moment away.
I dreamed in darkness, cold and alone. Phantasms shifted around me, frightening me, but I was powerless to escape them or even move, as I was sealed in a casket. I thought of the Queen, my Stepmother, and tears dripped from my eyes as I considered the quasi-poignant moments we had once shared, when we might have been considered to be close, when the Queen had nearly been a mother to me, and the face of love had shone radiantly upon me, before eclipsed again by the storms of Venus. I thought of the huntsman, stung to consider that my only friend had been poised to betray me, to kill me, and again in my mind I felt the horror of his shadow, of waiting while he came behind me, knowing there was no escape for me from a death he would inflict. My heart lifted as images of the Prince entered my mind, his grace atop a white-maned horse, always out of my reach, just beyond the words I longed to speak. If only there had been more time for us to fall in love. He might have saved me from those...