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And me? It was always you I loved, not your elegant strategy. I will love you still, if you now outgrow it. I will love you more whether time moves forward or backwards. Whether ice melts or water freezes back. Whether your next move is protection, break- through, shift, or any combination. There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three.
Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
There is nothing more undoing like a scandal.
Iseul remembers the first time she ever donned a disguise. It was a spur of the moment thing because young Iseul followed one oath with her heart and that was being good. A whisper of defiance was stirred by her younger sister Celia begging her to wear their brothers' clothes that she stole and sneak out with her to visit the winter fair that was going to disappear after that fortnight. Being responsible was stitched into the fiber of her skin the day Sebastian was born and she became the oldest and she really did play the part well. But the looming burden seemed to feel like it would crash on her any moment now and today, she felt like her shoulders would give out. So, she agreed and placated herself by thinking that she was going just to go so that she could look out for Celia. She's still being good. Her brother's clothes were a size too big and the hat kept slipping down her pinned hair but Iseul forever cherishes that feeling of breathing in clean smoke after years of suffocation. If news about it spread, she would forever be chastised for being so unladylike at her young age but she wasn't Iseul that night. Everyone believed that she was simply a boy going to the fair with his younger brother who would forever be enchanted by the buzzing life that seemed to move around him in a blur, an array of color blocks that seemed to paint an abstract view.
