Destiny

Some of the path I'd walked through life had been chosen for me .. some I'd broken from the reins to venture on my own, nowhere in any of it could have been foreseen that I would be here on a new world among such a passionate people trying to form a future. Would it be easier to simply turn loose completely and accept what was being told to me .. that the boy was my destiny. Why could I not feel that this was what and where my life's purpose was? Here was where I belonged, that I felt deeply about but as what, doing what? Life felt like a wild run away kaiila. How could I steer its course without a bridle and bit? How could I alter it without dampening the wonderous spirit that made me love being here? How do I live within the fate? Each question only provoked a newer one and none of them provided any answers.
Why was it that the interior of Ramza's wagon came to mind and haunted me, haunted every step that I took back to the wagons of the kaiila clan? I had never even seen the inside of it but he had told me once what was there, painted on the wall within, the beautiful murial of russets, browns and sienna's. It was his favorite place. The place that he had felt ... yess I knew what he felt and why. I had told him that day of my own favorite place, not the one I had spoken to Fonce of ... being next to his side but the first one I held close to my heart ... the treehouse. Just as Ramza had spoken with such burgeoning emotion of his mother's home, that one place had felt most like mine.
My beautiful blue world so far away, it weighed on me now in a place I kept secreted. I didn't dare look up at the blue of the sky because instinctively I knew that the flood of tears would begin and I wouldn't be able to dam them up again. I grew stronger here on the plains but I grew harder as well. They would not see me break. I'd allowed Fonce to see them for just one brief moment and he had said it was not my tears that he wanted. I'd looked at the end of my fingertips, still damp with the exposure of my frailties, of being a woman, of feeling emotions. Then held them up to the air and let them dry.
Why had all of this come to mind here .. now .. this moment as if it had waited in the shadows in precisioned ambush? Destiny. Those words made my teeth grit hard and my eyes glint in narrowed slits just like the they had the day Fonce first spoke them. Destiny had been my father's word. Destiny was when he made decisions for everyone around him that would benefit him .. not the one the decisions were made for.
'Leonette, you do not know what you want. The trusts have been established, and you WILL marry Charles just as it has it has been arranged. You will be Mrs. Charles Randall 'Skippy' McMasterson. It is your destiny. You should be happy.' Even the gold embossed monogrammed invitations had been chosen for me.
I had escaped for a few hours then in the recluse of the treehouse just as I did when I was a young girl. It was there that I felt Edmund. I felt his first awkard kiss, his long clumsy arms trying to fold around me and hold me to him. It was where I heard his heart beating even more fiercely than mine. The treehouse was where I had opened the official letter from the Armed Forces that said that Edmund was never going to sit in that treehouse with me again. It was where the tears fell and bathed the floor in rivers of sorrow.
Bell, you will serve the family of the boy you have chosen to look after. It is your destiny. It is not many who have been given such knowledge, you should be glad to know what yours is.
Why was it that those memories haunted me now? Simply because, I needed to feel those awkward arms encircling me, I needed to hear the words of reassurance that said that everything was going to be alright ... and just as it had been then, it was the same now. They were not going to be there. I was alone.
For the first time in my life, what I felt for the painted man that brought me here bordered on an emotion I had never known ... and my eyes glinted a fiery red and narrowed to near slits. I tried to erase him with a rise of my hand in the air. I wanted to erase him from my memories, from my thoughts. I wanted to erase any more influence he may over my destiny. I didn't want to dream anymore.