Dear Past, You Suck!

Preparation and Desperation

 Why is it that here every event is THE event. Sure this upcoming wedding is more important since it is the marriage of the next king but I am kind of getting tired of the whole "this must be perfect" attitude for every event there is. But once again, the residents of the house are panicking over the upcoming wedding. It is in less than a month. Margaret is very eager to officialize her place in the royal family before one of the royals has something to say as to why she is not good enough to be royal. Apparently it is a very common problem. I, though, am completely done with helping her plan. If it wasn't for the pure excitement she gets when the two of us are planning her wedding I would have quit helping ages ago. It has to be perfect. Which means that nothing is good enough. The flowers in all of southern England are not good enough. None of the pastry chefs are talented enough. The wedding dresses are not glamorous. Besides do we really expect the future queen to have what the common people have. And by common people, she means people like us. Who are dukes. And rich. And owns almost everything. You know, the common people. When she would get into her 'bow-before-me' moods, I would feign nausea and insist that I must lie down.Even though morning sickness hasn't been a problem for about a month now. Besides I'm just a fragile pregnant woman, I need a lot of down time.

Whenever I would get away, Charlie would meet me at the construction site with a picnic. Bread, jams, meats; whatever I wanted. So we would sit, talk about the day, and occasionally he would yell at the builders when they weren't doing something right. The sun was hot overhead and not a breeze blew through the county as we sat there. I was beginning to sweat through my dress, wishing I had some ice water-a luxury here. What I would give for that and a pair of shorts. The conversation between Charlie and I broke, a comfortable silence without any awkwardness spread between us. As Charlie broke apart another biscuit, I watched the builders begin on the second story of the house. Charlie looked up from his biscuit, staring out at the horizon thoughtfully.

"Do you ever wonder..." he said quietly like he didn't want to approach the subject.

"Wonder what?"

There was a few seconds of silence before he replied, "What it would be like if we were born somewhere else, sometime else, as somebody else."

"I have thought about that. Quite a bit after I had come back home after my...incident. But that I have moved past those flights of fancy. A woman that is starting a family can not be spending most her time imagining what life could be like when she should be making it," I shrugged, suddenly becoming very interested in pulling up the grass on the ground.

Charlie looked taken aback, "I'm surprised at you, El. I thought you were the more adventurous kind. But instead it seems I have come across the younger version of your mother!" he smirked.

"Charles Warlest, how dare you!"

"I do not see the trouble in imagining for a moment. Entertain me just for a minute or two."

"...fine."

"Alright imagine this. In two hundred years or so, we are born. Neither to wealth nor poverty, so we have no constant fight for money. We can spend the time doing what we wish, working on what we wish, being friends with whoever we wish. We would use technologies that are commonplace to us then but currently we cannot even imagine. There would be no classes, no expectations, we could go wherever we wanted whenever we wanted and nothing back home would fall apart without us!"

"I do not think this future of yours would be as great as you think it would be. Trust me."

"Well that is the thing about the future, you cannot know until it is there. What do you hope the future will be?" His eyes lit up excitedly as he talked, but the topic made false memories flash through my head and my stomach to begin to turn.