You only get to be queen once you cross the chessboard and get to the eighth square, that's the rule, we start as pawns and eventually we get taken out or get to the eighth square. Sometimes there are floods, sometimes there are fires, sometimes there are flowers that try to dissect and rip your petals off to prove that they were right and you were never one of them in the first place. I hate chess, I hate maths, I hate the uncertainty of crying over biscuits on tables that look absolutely infuckingpossible to manage to scale, I hate with my entire being, the Caucus race and the Dodo. All of those things have always felt impossible to me, which is why I'm not queen. Because some people understand that there is no such thing as impossible, merely impassable. I have never known someone to do the impossible quite like Mercedes. I have tangled myself up in her life for so long, sometimes when her arm moves it feels like my own. The harbinger of every good thing that has ever happened in my life even if we didn't know it, if the sky was black, if the world was ending, if she was there I knew there was a light to find the way home.

To call her fierce or strong or hard or anything like that would be a disservice, she's not just those things and sometimes those words feel like the consolation prize, that that's all a person can be, the frame work that we exist in is strict and unforgiving and she is strong, yes, and she is compassionate and she's beautiful and fucking ridiculous and she is faceted by her own design. I would never call her perfect, I would say the things she does are perfect, her consideration is perfect, her heart and how she loves is perfect - but the idea of the all encompassing of someone or something being perfection is boring and she's anything but that. The world exists and sometimes it feels like in spite of it, Mercedes will go out of her way to bring beauty with her wherever she goes. I've always been jealous of her, she has an ethic and a talent that is continued to be polished and refined and like, she's always been like that. She stands on things with her feet planted on the ground, you cannot shake her if she's sure and she knows what she's worth and what she wants, and I know she knows that people look up to her, but sometimes I don't know if she knows how far that goes. Far in the way that there are kids, of course, there are people, but the immediate ones around her, she's a force of nature and it is beautiful to watch. Which is to say, she's bested the garden and she's beaten the race, she's gotten through the trails and the tea parties. The thing that I have equated with Cedes for years now is when Alice insists to her sister that she is ready for adult tea, that she can and will hold herself to thee highest bar and principles and can hold her own with the conversations with the adults and her mum's friends and be a proper lady, whatever Alice imagines that to be, and she could have and she does, but it's the conviction and the determination that she knows that she's ready to be taken seriously at the table.

She's forged herself despite the mire and in the face of the awful people turning babies into pigs with pepper, she's even, I would argue, found the Jabberwocky and told them they were nothing, because while the unknown is exciting and interesting and can be beautiful, sometimes the nothing is the most frightening fucking thing in the world and she ruined the nothing. For me, for every person who tried and couldn't, for everyone who was too nervous or too scared or listened to the bleak things in the back of the forest, for the bones that litter too close to the top in the dark soil in the gardens, I hope she has the merriest unbirthdays in the coming year. That she knows how beautiful and important and how loved she always will be.