Ever After And Ever After And Unhappily Ever After

                I don’t know what to make of my interaction with him. I don’t know how to feel, after everything that has happened.

 

            When you lean out of your tower window, handkerchief in hand, waving it out to cry the usual “Help me, someone, please rescue me!” and some handsome hero finally works up the courage to cross the lava moat, leap the great chasm, challenge the dragon, and march the thousand steps to your room, every story ever told says that should be happily ever after.

 

            Every story ever told says then everything should be fine.

 

            They don’t tell you what to do if you wind up not being compatible. If your expectations don’t line up, and he’s too worried about continuously being your hero, but you’re just wanting to watch the trees rustle in the wind in silence over a cup of tea.

            Or if he expects you to respond with ‘I love you’ every time he says it, but you like to keep the words for a special occasion. After all, when you spend so much of your life locked away in a high stone prison, every moment you imagine using the words is met with flair, romance, charm. Even snogging the pillow is more commonplace.

            But that wasn’t even the whole of things. At some stage, on a particularly sick day of mine, I figured that I would vocalize my thoughts like adults do, like mature people in proper fairytales do. I mentioned that I was tossing around the idea of how we work, I mentioned the idea of a break, that it might be a good idea. That it might serve us well. I wasn’t expecting him to take me up on it immediately. To ask for a break then and there. To declare, in fact, that he thought it was a good idea, and so that was that.

            It was over so fast.

            I don’t… know if I would’ve brought it up if I had known. But would that have been better or worse? The troubles we were having were very real, and yet everything I did, I did in the hopes of maintaining that charming, heartfelt fantasy.

            Was it fair? Is it right to say he challenged the dragon and so gets to decide? Am I wrong to feel discarded?

            This wasn’t even recent. This was but a season earlier, and I stew on these matters because, of course, he eventually only came to see me when he could venture away from castle business. Getting to know me had, more or less, been a personal project, and he’d intended on keeping with it. On continuing forward, knowing me. Meeting me.

            Showing me friendship even if he’d stopped having any feelings for me.

            We drifted, of course, as the birds fly. North and south, north and south, close and far, close and far. And pricking like the needle each presence was, his departure hurt all the more.

            I wanted him to stay.

 

            Am I fated, written, to be stuck like this? In limbo? Between a happily ever after and the back cover of my book?

            Is my epilogue always going to be this complicated?

 

            …Recently, we warmed up again. Started talking, properly. I told him more of my life. Some of the romance that had come since he had gone. It’d been a season, so I figured it was okay, and in my defense, he approached the subject first. He had noticed how attached to one particularly charming necromancer I’d gotten, and teased me on the subject.

 

            I didn’t see it bother him. I don’t really know if it did. Am I vain, or hopeful? Am I imagining things?

 

            I’d told him, when we were together, about a relationship I’d had when I’d gotten locked in my tower, before the lava and the dragons. Someone who’d decided to try and romance me from the ground beneath my window, before I was fit to even consider such a thing. Acting like some sort of playwright’s puppet. I complained of it, and showed the pages I’d written wondering how that had happened, and how that’d gone. How I’d survived.

            When we argued, recently, he seemed to wonder if I was going to make him another ghoul in my stories. My legends of myself.

 

            Is that what writing this is..?

            Is that all he thought he was good for, in my life?

 

            And, in recent days, he said curious things. He and I were arguing. He’d lamented a situation at the round table which gave him so much grief. Where his squires were absent, and he had earned the title of a knight, somehow his achievements still were attributed to a knight he had once squired to, himself. Somehow the things he did and demonstrated, the tasks he’d picked up when they were abandoned, were nonetheless given credit to the one who abandoned them, which they happily took.

 

            It wasn’t fair to him. I tried to express as much. But I fear I got caught up in demonstrating that I understood what he was saying and failed to really show him what he was looking for.

            He returned again to my home in the city the following day, an evident question on his mind. He’d announced his arrival with a query underlining that he wanted to ‘illuminate the bleakness’.

                        Hogwash, really. Though-… perhaps I am simply bitter.

            He was angry with me over those same comments. No reconciliation or explanation that day or previous had meant anything, would resolve anything. And so we bickered, and argued, and fought. I sealed the windows, I was so embarrassed at our neighbors hearing us, but I was not so kind as to spare him my woes and irritations, my limits. And to so profoundly demonstrate to him that I was at my wits end trying to be earnest in my actions.

            Was that where I went wrong? Should I have pretended all was well and that it hadn’t troubled my mind?

            He had always told me he preferred honesty. Was that the truth, or was honesty what ruined me..?

            And now, I lament myself. I lament my emotions, I cannot even surrender this problem to let myself drift among the emotions that come calling once more for another. Isn’t that horrible?

 

            …

 

            It has been a few days.

            Despite my declarations, despite insisting that projects we made together meant so much to me, despite illustrating how nice it was that he made the efforts to save me, I have not managed to dissuade his troubles.

            And for this failure, he has withdrawn. I have not seen him, and I do not know if or when I will see him again.

            I had, at one stage, long been the princess who would stop answering letters if the person bored me, or made no apparent attempt to climb my tower.

            Was this divine justice? Did those in their heavenly thrones laugh at the irony of my situation?

            Did he care to ever write back to me more than answers shorter than the disturbance of the inkwell..?

 

            …

            Will I ever return to being satisfied with such answers?

            …

            I do not know if I hope to or not.