“The Resolve of Sybil Rise” by Rick Midler
When Sybil was a girl, she would climb the attic steps of her family’s estate in Yorkshire, where, in solitude, she sipped orange blossom tea as the windows fogged with sea air and the eventide turned everything a bright, impossible purple. The fields below looked like vast, rippling clouds, and she imagined walking across them—untethered, unobserved, her amaranthine skirt billowing like orchid petals liberated by the wind. Her father said such fancies were unbecoming of a lady, but Sybil had a way of believing in impossible things. She knew in her heart that the clouds approved, and that the air itself grew stronger, inspired by her defiance.
Today, travelers who pass by this mountainside—inhabited only by orange blossoms and haloed by purple clouds that glitter like the pulse of an unapologetic dream—swear they can hear her whisper: “Every world worth living in must first be imagined.”
