Neo Roma 🐴👑

The tragedy, so the classicists say, is a function of hamartia, that error in judgment that leads to the inevitable tumble from grace. As with so many things I was taught to regurgitate as a child, I do not know if this is so, or if we have all reassured ourselves it must be so, adding some explicable two act framework to the common and capricious cruelty of life. 

I was raised of a Shakespearean bent, and the Poetics were not yet translated at that time. I do not know if I believe it universal. But I suppose he, too, wrote that it was not in our stars, but in ourselves. 

It is true, I suppose in a light. She made so many errors. Can an error borne of love truly be called as such? She was brave, and devoted, and true. Haruka. She did not see love in herself or for herself--I suppose it is impossible to see the end of one’s own nose--but that was her truest error, should we assign one to her. 

Sleep seldom visits sorrow, so Sebastian tells us. I have had sad hours, seeming long, to consider these things. Walking the same steps over and over again, wondering if I could make the play end differently, if only I shouted loud enough. 

But the error was not hers, in the end. It was not, and I will not call it so. The error was that moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her mercurial appetites and imagined histories, sent us off to die in her holy war, the young blood feeding the machine of the old, as it ever has been and ever will be. 

Haruka believed in it. My Haruka, with eyes grey as kitten fur, her hair falling over her brow like a farmboy that should have been made prince, but did not possess the birth nor the casual malignity of that office. A beautiful thing, set against a cruel one like the blossoms against a spring frost. 

Do you imagine a battlefield? Can you? I scarcely could, when I was young, the whinny of the horses as they crashed into the mud, the clash of sword. All overlaid by powerful speech--If we are marked to die, we are enow. To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honor. 

Dramatic. Childish. The words of the hopelessly naive. You cannot imagine the heavy thunk of steel on a body. The low cry of someone desperately wounded. The hot pounding in your ears as you walk a tightrope between life and death. No, it is not a tightrope. it is a tug of war. There must be a loser. Even the winner walks away in mud, hands rubbed to bleeding. 

A true soldier does not hear the glorious trumpet, nor the stories of heroism. These things are for the hoi polloi, clamoring for a true story of greatness. Begging to hear that the nobility and honor of this land are worth fighting for, so long as they never have to do it themselves.  But the solider who fights? No. The solider lying in the darkness hears one thing, and one thing alone. 

Sleep no more. A murdered ghost calling out of the earth. Sleep no more. 

I am no murderer. No, that is an untruth. I am not her murderer. 

Yet I hear her cry all the same. And I obey. 

You’re right. I should stop the prelude, and come to it. But I set this stage as explanation for everything about to come. A war, a promise, a notion of intangible near-lies like justice and love. 

The world ended under the blue-grey sky of winter, a call to arms made. A galaxy, a star, another of the endless enemies that come to the door of the innocent in their own mind. It began with her pinky touching mine, the warmth of it full even beneath her glove. To love each other so long, and still to play like children in this way. It was her gift. I was a teenager forever in the sweet tempest of her devotion. 

It feels like a twinge, at first. When you are called. A stomachache you could almost ignore, then it becomes a twist, a chain dragging to where you are needed. Ah, this isn’t how you imagined it. I confess that makes two of us. But please remember we are not a volunteer squadron. Attendance is mandatory. 

And so it was, as snowflakes tangled off the edge of her lashes, and I felt that easy, careless foolishness of great love, that the little interloping devil of a pain came into my stomach, entering through my back like a sniper’s shot. A danger had come to us. Again. One we were never permitted to take down, not fully, but only to repel, like one might spray a cat on the counter with water. 

A tabby cat, in our treatment; a tiger in theirs. 

The wind blew cold, up my skirt. Haruka convinced herself that it was so very Roman of us to cover our legs with only a scrap, and she would prove this point with her little short sword brandished. Minako used to laugh, at that, but rarely did she argue. She more than anyone knew that you needed to carry with you whatever you could to sweeten the medicine. 

I should give the full story, here. I should speak on that aforementioned thunk of steel on a body. And yet, for all the poetry and fine words spilt on the matter, I cannot call them up for that day. It was not a poem. It was not an epic. I barely remember it, and the things I do recall are as if seeing through stained glass, the sounds dampened by the stone church of my own remove. 

I saw the red, streaking across the bright white. This I recall with perfect clarity. Snowflakes still resting on her long lashes. 

From somewhere, there came a scream, tortured and tearing. A ghost among us even then, so suddenly. 

The trumpet sounds retreat; the day is ours.

We are the flowers of the Moon Kingdom, they say in . It is a cold garden, in which we are planted, an open field blooming with marble and gold leaf, row on row. A bloom forever frozen, honored with the chance to be forever spoken of in speeches and children’s stories alike. In that garden we stood, to see the honored soldier offered up with honeyed words. The princess was crying. This was what united the battlefield with the ramen shop, in truth, was her capacity to weep. Some people are born to their gifts. 

Swear. 

The ghost shrieked of an unjust end, and I did know the culprit, even as she stood next to me crying. The others did not move, taking it for the wind whistling through the trees. A mere effect of chance and meteorology. 

But one must imagine himself Hamlet. 

The error was not Haruka’s. She was the fallen sparrow, the providence of God made flesh in the choice. No. That is pretty words, wrapping up the truth. Forgive me, I am terribly prone to such. I have been taught since I was young. Let me make it plain. She was murdered. She was murdered.

I made a promise. I set my hand on the sword that had be hers, and I swore in such a fashion as I have never known. I have believed myself empty, for so much of my life? Do you laugh to hear me say that? But it is true. 

The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the tables of celebration. It was a short time, where we commemorated another victory, another routing of the enemy who would only regroup and return, the curtain rising again on that same play, now down a a member of the cast. But you would know no such thing, to see the food laid on the table, the drinks sparkling in the light. A few sniffled words about how lovely it would be if Haruka were here. 

One must imagine himself Hamlet. 

Swear. 

I have you told you this, to explain to you my reasons. I am no great evil, though you will surely think me so. I thought myself empty, but I have found a warmth and fullness in myself. In hating her murderer, I have discovered a dangerous humanity in myself. Macduff, of course, but I have understood Iago. I have sympathized with Richard most of all, his weak and ineffectual king, forced to snivel and bow until the moment he was freed by his own blade. 

I made a promise. I will keep it. I hear the ghost screaming even now. 

Royalty. Choice. They say a king envies the common man his sleep. And yet she sleeps so peacefully, within. She who gave me great sympathy and cried on my shoulder over a girl she sent to die for an ideal, a dream, a fantasy. Heavy hangs the head that wears a crown. 

I shall relieve her the weight. I that have neither pity, love, nor fear. 

I have you told you this, to explain to you my reasons. I am no great evil, though you will surely think me so. I will not longer, like a whore, unpack my heart with words. My voice is in my sword.  It is true, my captive on the floor, that you failed as a guardian, but perhaps you will find success as a messenger. I will take her blade, upon which I swore, and I will end this. 

One must imagine himself Hamlet. Freed of the indecision.