We are brought up on fairytales. That love comes riding in on a white horse like a prince. That it mends, makes whole, rescues. But The Essence by Miranda Baron peels away the sparkles and presents the shadow fairytale, the one where the tower is a trap, the prince is a predator, and love is something you must survive.
In such poems as “Rapunzel Can’t let her hair down” and “You Balance My Beam,” Baron captures a stark, unvarnished portrait of love that starts in the sunshine and ends in darkness. They are not tales of healthy romance. They are tales of illusion, of being beguiled by the wrong things, attention for affection, possession for passion, control for care.
The dream romance in Baron’s universe is irresistible at first. It calls the heart like fate. “You fell for the shine,” she appears to say through her verses. But then the shine departs. What remains is something chillier, something that takes more than it gives, that brings pleasure and substitutes it with bewilderment. The “prince” becomes the doorkeeper of your value, the castle a prison.
This is the emotional landscape Baron treads so boldly: the badlands. In this terrain, the dream went bad, where the narrative you constructed for yourself about love no longer aligns with the reality you are experiencing. And worse still, where your voice, your gut, and your truth get silenced in the process.
What is so remarkable about Baron’s poetry is her refusal to sentimentalize the hurt. No idolizing the heartache here. Rather, she names the ache unapologetically. She lays bare the manipulation, the gaslighting, the times she, like countless others, remained too long, apologized excessively, and believed too intensely in someone who continued to rip her to pieces.
But Baron also does something more potent: she reclaims herself. In verse, she grasps for truth and claw-marks out of the story that once contained her. She allows her readers glimpses of the girl who was lied to, blamed, and battered, but she does not keep her there. She lets us witness her soaring.
Because the real fairytale is not finding “the one.” It is finding yourself after being lost in someone else. It is waking up from the nightmare and realizing you are still here, still worthy, still whole, even with the scars.
The Essence is, in its essence, a reclaiming. Of narrative. Of self. Of voice. It reminds us that the worst relationships do not define us; they refine us. And that sometimes, you must travel through the badlands to recall that you were the hero all along.
So if you have ever loved someone who broke you, if you have ever handed over your heart only to have it returned in pieces, know this: you are not alone. And your story does not end there.
In fact, it might just be the beginning.