Princess Adila didn't know why she was crying. The ceremony hadn't even started yet, all she had to do was wait another few minutes and then nobody would notice because then everyone would be tearing up, but something inside her had collapsed. Every time she'd thought she'd grown, thought that she was strong, thought that she had figured things out this just happened again! Nonsense thoughts crashed through her head like boulders, trying to impose a pattern on this upwelling of feeling. Maybe it was because of the light, or the memories of having been here before. Maybe it was because she was jealous and wished that today was her day. Maybe it was because she missed her friends, the constant immediate presence of them rather than these occasional meetings and formal events. Maybe it was because there were all these people she knew by reputation, knew of rather than knew personally, hints at lives that she'd only touched in the most fleeting way.

It was a feeling that had been following her for weeks. A vague, unsteady pressure that wasn't so much a sense that things were wrong as much as they were different. Every stage of her life had been marked by a feeling like this - every time she'd had to move on from one part of herself to the next the feeling had haunted her and buried her in a similar melancholy. For a while she'd made her peace with it... she'd learned that the past and the present were always entangled, and through determination she could stitch those times together. Moving forwards didn't mean losing what you'd left behind. Each stage of her life was better than the one before. All those rational thoughts and patterns tried to apply order on her emotions, like an ice-cube tray trying to organize the ocean.

In her mind's failure to understand itself it began casting increasingly desperately around for the secret source of her emotions. Maybe this was because she'd gotten turned around twice while walking the Labyrinth to get here. Maybe it was because she'd forgotten to pack her toothbrush. Maybe it was someone's fault. Something like this couldn't come from nowhere, it was too big for that. She just needed to figure out what dumb thing was tripping up her dumb brain and making her unable to process this moment. It had to be something simple because these problems [i]always[/i] seemed simple in retrospect. 

Maybe she'd just been carrying these feelings inside her for so long and she had nowhere else to put them. Maybe she just had to cram them all in right here. Maybe she didn't know how to express how important everyone here was to her other than shattering into pieces in front of them.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. She might never hit upon the answer for this feeling, or she might have correctly identified it and then discarded it because the truth was no help at all in dealing with it. This wasn't a matter of being right or saying the right words, because no words could stop the tears. This wasn't a matter of strength, because even the softest of touches could hold her up and stop her from falling.