Flying away from my troubles. on Quidditch Pitch

Tatiana Vorontsova

June 26, 2019 8:21 PM

Flying away from my troubles. by Tatiana Vorontsova

Five years.

It seemed incredible. The calendar, the changes in the faces of her friends and family, and even the proficiency of her English all attested that it was in fact a fact, but Tatiana could still hardly believe it had really been five years since she had first come to Sonora.

Normally, she was not given to all this thinking, but she had a problem. With the first years occupied with Orientation, no homework assigned to her to do yet, and her friends otherwise occupied, she had nothing to keep her mind occupied. Five years ago, this would have simply impelled her to read something, or else take out her jewels and use polishing as an excuse for admiring and rearranging them, but her brain wouldn't be quiet today.

Thinking was no good. When she had never done it, she had been much happier; now, when it happened, she went all gloomy. Now, for instance; what was the point of thinking about summer at all right now, never mind worrying about what her friends would think of it?

She did not expect to see them too soon anyway, but there was a certain relief in knowing that in going to throw her feelings against the air, she would also avoid them until her mind was in a more settled state. Then she would be able to think about what was happening now, instead of what had happened at other times.

This is probably for the best, Mama had remarked when Tatiana had told her that she expected her visits to Dorya to be limited this summer, as his family was spending most of the holiday in China. We cannot spare you very often this summer, either - we must go visit Annushka, and you should go more into society, too.

At first, Tatiana had been horrified, sure Mama meant to tell her she must put her hair up and let her skirts down and be a lady earlier than anticipated, but she had relaxed when she had realized Mama only meant to let her attend tea dances and slightly older girls’ debuts and the like, as a sort of preparation for when she would be forced to really join society. This was alarming and ominous, of course, because Tatiana did not want to come out to society and have to behave as an adult for the rest of her life and Mama allowing her to participate in more of the comparatively casual summer occasions was a bad sign that Mama might think she was nearly ready to be allowed Out anyway, but it was better than the alternative. Most girls did not come out until they were sixteen, but her cousin Mashka had put her hair up at fifteen and a half. Of course, Mashka was a tall, strong girl who looked like a woman and was desperate to get married anyway, and none of these traits were among those shared by Tatiana, but….

She had not entered the occasions in any good humor, then, but once there...it had been peculiar. She had not thought so much about the horrors of adulthood, but had thought rather a bit about the young gentlemen - Fedya all over again, both literally, as he’d been one of them again, and figuratively, as others had tried to flatter her and had asked her to dance a great deal and go on walks and drives with chaperones and all.

This was, of course, what she had always been told was completely natural. Grisha and her sisters had teased her a little, of course (along with even Mama and Papa, though less so than her siblings), but it was the way things were supposed to happen. The reason one entered society at a certain age was because one was old enough to consider marriage, which involved liking, as appropriate, young men or young women. There was nothing wrong, as Mama and Anya, the married ladies in her immediate family, had adamantly told her, with enjoying the attention, so long as she did not do anything disgraceful or overlook character flaws for a pretty face or anything like that. From chatting with Dorya last year, she did not think her friends would think there was anything wrong with that, either. It was another thing which was a problem, and something she thought they might all, if she admitted it, find it worse than if she simply wasn’t grown up enough to be interested yet.

She enjoyed the dancing, the flirting, admiring and being admired. She had even thought about whether or not she might like to kiss a few of them, though of course she had not. But the rest of it...it wasn’t there.

She still didn’t want to marry. She still didn’t feel any desire to have children. She didn’t even want to attend grand occasions, much less host them. She just wanted to dance sometimes, and maybe kiss the prettiest fellows, and then...go home, back to sharing rooms with her sisters and taking tea every night with them and her brothers and parents, back to spending most of her year with her friends. She liked dancing and admiring and being admired, and thought she might enjoy...a bit of other things, if she had the chance, but she wasn’t in love with anyone, or even remotely inclined to be.

This was not proper. It was unnatural, even. She was old enough to want to kiss someone, but she was supposed to be in love with Whoever, and she was supposed to want to get married and have a family separate from her own. But she didn’t.

She couldn’t imagine what people would think. Perhaps Papa would laugh and say she could be a little kolibri for a little longer, until she met someone good enough for her; perhaps Mama would sigh a little through her nose but not really offer any objection - but perhaps they would be horrified. Or perhaps Mama would sigh a little through her nose and ask again why Tatiana could not be more like Anya. And her friends - unless she counted Mila, who was notably not here, they were all high romantics. What could they possibly think of someone who just liked a bit of an ogle and a dance but still just got impatient at the very idea of falling in love?

Of course, they knew this about her - sort of. It was almost an inside joke, her dismissal of such things. And it was all right, as a sort of joke. Tatiana herself over-emphasized it sometimes, for a laugh, among them. But they thought she was just as disinterested in kissing as in love, and that it was a childish thing. They would surely expect her to grow out of it too, especially if they saw her dancing with boys and teased her as the family had and then expected her to be normal. You were supposed to want to kiss someone because you were in love them and wanted to be with them all the time, not just...as a thing that might be interesting to do, but no more.

Flying was a welcome relief from the sudden bout of thinking about this. There was no-one at Sonora whom she had ever really thought about kissing, so once she got it out of her head, she imagined the problem would not occur to her again until she was back home, or even until it was next summer and she presumably was expected to spend time in Russia again. And so she kicked off the ground hard, venting her annoyance with herself at the dirt, and then flew straight up as fast as possible before diving back toward the ground, the tail of her tied-back hair flying out behind her as she went lower and lower, then pulled up again, sailing toward the opposite end of the Pitch from the one she had entered.

16 Tatiana Vorontsova Flying away from my troubles. 1396 Tatiana Vorontsova 1 5