Sleeping Beauty Woke Up Angry

They told me the world would be different when I woke.

That the thorns would have withered, that the towers would gleam, that men would have learned gentleness, that kingdoms would have learned justice.

They lied.

I opened my eyes to the same stone walls, the same corridors echoing with footsteps of power, the same crown waiting to anchor me to the floor, the same hands already reaching to guide me — without asking where I wanted to go.

A hundred years asleep, and still my worth is measured in silence and skin.

They call it a miracle, but it feels like theft — all those years stolen, and the story still owned by someone else.

In my dreams, I built another kingdom.

One without kings.

One where the roses had thorns that defended the garden, not walls that kept the garden for a chosen few.

One where no woman was ever kissed awake without her consent.

In my dreams, the forest had grown wild and free.

The wolves had learned to sing in harmony with the deer.

The rivers had carved new paths, washing the blood from the old roads.

Even the wind seemed lighter, no longer carrying the screams of battles fought over pride.

But when I rose, the court still gathered like vultures, their robes heavy with dust and entitlement, their words polished until they gleamed with insincerity.

They wanted gratitude.

They wanted compliance.

They wanted me to curtsy to a world that had let me vanish for a century.

They wanted their sleeping beauty to be quiet, even when awake.

And for a moment, I almost gave them what they wanted.

The habit of stillness is hard to break.

The body remembers how to lie there, how to let others narrate its existence.

But then I remembered the dreams.

And dreams, once remembered, are dangerous.

I am not quiet.

I am not beautiful for them anymore.

I will not wear this crown like a muzzle.

I will not trade my waking for their comfort.

I am the thorn now.

I am the dream that will not be tamed.

I have carried a century of stillness inside my bones, and I will pour it into movement so loud it will rattle the gates of every kingdom that forgot to change.

They will hear me in their banquet halls.

They will hear me in their hunting fields.

They will hear me when I walk barefoot through their marble corridors, leaving footprints they cannot erase.

You cannot kiss me back to obedience.

You cannot drape me in satin and call it freedom.

You cannot crown me and pretend it is anything but a shackle.

I woke up angry — and my anger is a spell they cannot break.

This is not the end of the story they told.

It is the beginning of the one I will write.

And I will not sleep again until the world wakes with me.