Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue...

To the junior who'd now refuse to write,
with an assurance that it was received well,
here's to the theme you chose, and the pen that I...

The jagged stench of the cleanest grove dressing augmented the anxiety of an already worrisome attic, swelling and surviving to all lengths, snubbing the possibility of a succumb to the soothing warmth of a mid-November afternoon. It was a rather unusual dressing; appreciably undersized than the standard, with a singular slender extension that would fold in as a drawer to hoard an almost nothing, a heavy crescent at the base to rest sudden weary feet on and an unfairly blemished mirror in the middle of it all, oddly curved, which showed in a faint clearness- a hallowed medal, a silver pin, an ashen rag, a sapphire headdress and the restless profile of a lady in white. Giselle carefully adjusted the length of the thin netted cloth from the hem to the left, staring closer at her mirrored self that appeared pretty from nearly every profile, as she felt the soft rest of the neatly done bun against the end of her nape. She wasn’t very sure of all the flounce in the lacey arms though, but then the gown that her mother had once felt this pretty in wasn’t allowed to be tailored in the slightest, and so she had to agree with every slip and line in it. Giselle was to be a bride this afternoon; she was to look the most beautiful she’d ever had and was to walk the smallest steps holding her father’s brawny arms to the hum of the most loaded choir. She was also to hold onto, with a rather heavy heart, the medal, the pin, the rag and the headdress; her something old, something new, her something borrowed and her something blue…

The little that now remained of the feeble fires in the wooden grate of a typical London café wouldn’t help balm the numb in her feet, she knew. It had been more than an hour that she’d been following the outlandish patterns the ashes at the stand would contour into, the last she’d noticed being an antelope’s top that was now reduced to something more asymmetrical and hence more helpful in chasing random worries. She’d known this place best for the longest while now, and more still the picture through the meshes of a window that ran all along the left wall, looking onto a busy walk, the best of two white walls, a lonely bench, and the bottom of an attic rail. They’d say that all days did regular rounds of bright and murk, like the skies of suns and clouds, and men of delight and despair, though she’d only ever see the color in the dark, hear cackles in the whimpers, feel the warmness of the steaming cocoa against her boorish palm in the bitter November-cold of her feet. She’d known and loved life, even with the hideousness in the loss of the slightest degree of an anything static, that things actually do acquire a pace and need to be respected for, than be bleated over for the most obvious wrongness. Maria had been much astute, and also brave to be trying to embrace happiness even when there was not much around…

‘Giselle!’

It must have been time. She quickly pulled her veil back on, reshaped the skirt of her playful gown, and in a swift move ran for the aging rail that ran all through the edge of the attic. It was a bright day after all, not squelchy or gloomy, or unusual in the most little, more like a customary wedding afternoon that she’d always assumed she’d have one to herself, and that they always knew she would. Running her hands over the warmth of the sunlit metal, and throwing half her self over it, Giselle raked closer at the busy stone-walk, and the bushed out men that walked it, her own high walls and their fine whiteness, the wooden bench that she’d once always sit on, and the shady stretch with the steaming mug on the other side of the walk whom she’d sit on it with. She’d been told of the concept of circles and that of lines, that all that there is and can be, would by the fate of its existence close to meet its contrary, like the day to a night, a smile to a frown, quite like the head of even the straightest lines to its own tail and then into a circle. Contraries live more like the most querulous neighbors, and yet the closest. Her happiness was now only to come to terms with it’s own. Filling with immediate warmth that she’d not quite felt in days now, Giselle pulled away her veil and ran for the inside of the attic, to come back in the bright again and to throw away from her wedding bunch, a blossom, to her true something old, something new, her something borrowed and her something blue...