She always comes.
This is the first thing to understand about her: she is not an accident. She is not a surprise. She is not something you could have avoided if you had only made better choices, been less open, trusted less, loved less carefully or more carefully or differently.
She comes because she comes. That is her nature. She finds the ones who are building something and she comes for them.
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She has many faces.
Sometimes she comes as a person — the one who calls you selfish, the one who shuts the gate, the one who says *bend your knee* with such certainty that you almost do. Sometimes she comes as a system — the waiting room, the form that cannot be completed, the doctor whose signature is permanently unavailable. Sometimes she comes as the inside of your own head at three in the morning, which is her favourite hour, the hour she has the most power.
Sometimes she comes as winter — just winter, just the long dark, just sixteen hours of sleep and the sense that nothing will ever be different.
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But here is what I know about the White Witch:
She has never won.
Not once. Not in any story worth telling.
She always comes and she is always formidable and the cold she brings is real and the gates she closes stay closed and the price she demands is genuine —
and still she has never won.
Because the lion comes back, or the daffodil comes back, or the girl turns around and finds she has been building a garden all along in the space behind her that she thought was just the place where she kept her grief.
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I have met the White Witch many times.
I have stood in her winter and thought: *this is it. this is where I stop.*
And then I didn't stop.
And now I am here, in April, in the garden, in the light that morfar left in the returning things, with a cat who knows what medicine is and a pen and all the Februaries behind me and the absolute certain knowledge:
*She does not get the garden.* *She never did.* *The garden was always mine.*
*I bloom forth. In spite of everything.* *Especially in spite of everything.*