Fairy Tales are for Children

For you, my Prince.

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I don’t know when I started loving you. Perhaps it was the morning you came up behind me and wrapped me in your arms. Maybe it was the night before, when you entered me for the first time. I don’t know exactly when it started, or what it will do. But I do love you.

I think you must have known me better than I thought you could. That night, that first night. My first time as a lover, our first time as lovers. Of course you knew I was frightened, nervous. You answered my anxiety with your mouth, gentle caresses, and a “let’s kill the lights.” I’m not a supermodel, nor will I ever be. My body is solid and strong, my curves abundant. A soft place in which to seek refuge, a welcoming home to those I embrace. The first place your fingers went was to my stomach. You knew. And though it was dark, I could still see your eyes, like pools of warm honey. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ they said to me. ‘You are you and I am me, and here we are, together. It’s alright.’ I told my eyes to talk back to you, to say to you, ‘Be my first. Please desire me, want me. Take me.’

I finally found my voice and asked you to make love to me. You were waiting for me to ask. The answer to my question was a kiss unlike any I had ever had, one both urgent and tender. Your body slid atop mine, my legs parted and my hips adjusted to feeling the sweet weight of you above me. And then you entered me, the head of your desire parting me so slowly, so carefully. You seated yourself deeply inside my body while looking me in the eye, and I thought, ‘I am made for this. We are made for this.’ I saw the moonlight dripping through the window, spilling across your back and over the hand I had laid there. You entered my body. Perhaps it was a side effect of your deliciously deep thrusts that you also penetrated my heart, but I don’t think that was why. And we began to make love.

Here is a point that confuses me. How can one really make love? Could it be something that just randomly and suddenly happens, like spontaneous human combustion or the vase that no one wants to fess up to breaking? Although it may work for the vase, I don’t think you can blame love on the cat. (We all know, of course, that it was your brother who broke the vase. That’s it.)

Is making love like making a table or a chair? Do you see a block of wood, sand out the roughness, cut off the pieces you don’t want, and produce a Stradivarius violin? Or is it more like a recipe, with ingredients carefully measured and added? Must it simmer, boil, or freeze? How long does it have to bake, and at what temperature? Do I have all the ingredients, in the right proportions? Am I supposed to have all the ingredients, or will the person I make love with be the one to supply what is missing?

I’m not sure of any answers, but we were doing it. Making love. You and I. Some of your ingredients, a few of mine, and voila! There it was. Love. Things taste different to everyone, and though I am not sure how it tasted to you, it was certainly sweet to me. A delicious affair of love. I’m not sure how it started or how it got there. Maybe it was the first time we made love. Maybe it was the next morning when you came up behind me and wrapped your arms around me. In any case, there it is, and there it will be.

It sounds great on paper. But sooner or later the unwelcome neighbor of reality has to come over, annoy you, and borrow a tool it will never return. You, Lover, are the tool it took away, and I was uncertain as to whether I would ever see you again. And although we did see each other once more, and possibly will again, reality is still there, its finger poised mere inches from the doorbell. I have no idea when I will see you again, or even if I will see you again.

You will never be in the audience to hear my first concert of the season. You cannot be here to stroke my hair and murmur comfort to me when my oldest and dearest pet dies. I can never whisk you away to a surprise picnic on your lunch break, or make you chicken soup and read you stories when you are sick. Never can I give you a narrated tour of my zoo, or spend an entire, lazy weekend with you in bed, fighting over the comics and bashing one another with pillows. You won’t be the first to kiss my cheek and call me “Doctor.” There are many constraints there – distance, time, circumstances. Fairy tales are for children, and I am no longer a child. Perhaps I should change my name.

My real name means ‘princess.’ But I am not a princess. I am a regular girl. And though you are a Prince, I doubt that you are keeping a white horse in your garage. If you are, I hope you have plenty of water available and a giant pooper scooper. Yes, these things, along with understanding neighbors.

You know, I am happy to have had at least a cameo in a story that has some of the loveliest parts I have ever known. I am glad the ingredients I tasted belong to you, and I certainly had fun mixing them with my own. I thank you for that. Perhaps our story ends here, or maybe another chapter is being written. You keep your tender brown eyes open, and I will do the same. Only in my case, they’re blue. I don’t think we will ever live happily ever after. But we will live. And that, I suppose, is a very good thing.

I do love you.