Page 5 of Rust and Bloom

The question that opens my eyes fully—not the light, not habit, but the question—is this… is it possible I have always been a late riser, and the only reason I'm experiencin' it as revelation now is because I'm finally shed of the last of Eleanor's influence, peelin' it back like a silk cloak someone else chose for me?

I hold that thought up to the light the way she would have held a negative.

It doesn't quite fit, though. It's not like she died yesterday. It's been years, and the grief has long since composted itself into something more complicated than grief, something with roots, and a smell, and no clean name.

So the timeline doesn't match up.

Whatever this is, it isn't a delayed revelation due to her absence.

What it might be is the very new and somewhat terrifying act of burning down the Little Ashby Princess persona.

Not the wardrobe. I'm keepin' the wardrobe.

I won't be apologizin' for my fashion taste. I like everything about dresses.

But the rest? The schedule, the performed wakefulness, the 6 a.m. alarm set not for productivity but for the performance of productivity—that is what I am burnin' down, methodically, one morning at a time.

Maybe I should just embrace the late-riser label now and spare myself the remaining days of internal negotiation.

Three days is a pattern. That's just math.

And I can't say that I hate it, not even a little.

What is the point of being rich and unemployed if you can't sleep in?

And on that note, I am tired of thinking about employment. Bone tired of it.

I've been working my whole damn life.

Repeat that thought, Savannah. Say it again and let it land.

Because it's a little crazy when you hold it up to the light.

I'm like one of those reclusive child actresses—the ones that make millions before they're startin' first grade, whose faces are licensed before they can spell their own names, who go off the grid at fifteen and come back quiet and strange, and everyone calls it a breakdown, but really it's just someone finally getting to breathe.

I won't say I didn't have a childhood. I did, and it was a genuinely sweet one, the way a well-staged photograph can be genuinely beautiful and also fundamentally staged at the same time.

Eleanor's whims gave me summer light, and field flowers, and the best horses money could acquire.

She gave me golden hours, literally.

She just happened to sell them afterward.

But I never had freedom, and now I do.

Not only that, I have money. Lots of it. The kind that doesn't require tending, the kind that simply exists.

And I am wastin' whole days on elaborate pity parties about having no job, when the job was—literally—only ever a performance. Every alarm. Every curated morning. Every caption. A performance.

The audience just never knew they were the point.

I could be living my best life.

I should be livin' my best life.

So instead of putting on a dress and performing contentment for an audience of no one, I walk into my closet and open the door at the back that leads to my riding wardrobe.

I am going to spoil my horse today.