Forget Perfect Endings

The fairies have a word for you. They want you to not believe. They want you to wake up. Despite their tales’ command of poignant mysticism or of enduring magic or of a promised forever, the fairies trust that you would discover bewitchment and hypnotism cast upon you and your desires; that you would recognize you are being forced to live in a world so idealistic that wishes are never overly ambitious and that goodness is always the reward for the good. The child in you wishing to be rescued from distress or be the savior of love is well clouded by the dust of fantasy that the words “once upon a time“ are louder than the beating of your own heart.

Do you claim love as true when the only reason for saving is beauty? Do you claim victory after a dragon’s defeat? Do you always await a prize at the top of the tower?

Forever is the end. It is when everything has come to a perfect conclusion. Hostility dies. Evils lose. Sinners repent. Every corner glimmers and celebrates. Every corner is peace and hope and justice.  No darkness enters before the languor of festivity. Yet remember, this is the end.

Does faith remain? Does magic continue? I tell you, Yes, if you forget perfect endings.

Perfect endings mean not a need for change, thus no variation. Perfect endings mean not a need for battles, thus no reason to be strong for. Perfect endings mean not a need for sacrifice, thus no greater measure of love. Perfect endings deny all possibilities of growth, of seeking, of fighting, of forgiving, trapping you in a make-believe reality that everything is impeccable. If ending has but no fault, nothing can be more worthless.

If ending is perfect and therefore divorced from any form of negativity, you find no meaning, no sense of trust, no anticipation. You have taken away your humanity and embraced governance of enchantment ever after.

Perfect endings do not guarantee happy endings. Sometimes–most of the time–flawed endings and flawed souls are happier, even than gratitude is.

A Daughter’s Confession

It was something not everyone would understand. Or would they even dare to? It was a tale worth not telling the world forever for it was nothing but lies, a corruption of the soul, a defiance of every sacred truth.  A tale meant to be hidden for thousands of centuries and a thousand more.

It was ashamed of the sun, the sun that blessed the earth with its power of a conqueror, the sun that was frugal enough to show itself only during the first half of the day and then leave everything of the second half to its weak counterpart—the moon—pathetic  for all its scroungings of light from it.

It was the same sun that killed me and the one I loved; the same sun that hated our kind and whose flames scorched us to death. It put an end to everything but not to the heritage of our existence, because that heritage would continue to live on even if we were ended by this vilest conqueror.

Second to the sun was my father. He was a theft, a stealer. He managed to steal lives from people. Their innocence was what he loved to watch over. Their fear of him was what thrilled him the most. Their cry was music to his ears deaf to all the simple wishes of his victims to spare their lives. He would not hesitate to kill if he thirsted. He would kill. And that was what he did to me.

Yet, mine was not theft but a trade, for when he took away my life, I was given a present. This was ‘the gift of all gifts’ as my father would always say. This was the gift of a new life—a life so different from what my life was before he killed me when I was just turning nineteen. From then on I did not count years. I counted decades. I counted centuries. I counted until I got tired of watching ages go by from these unchanging eyes of eternal youth. I got tired of seeing people die of terrible sickness, or of old age, or of my father’s slaughter.

My hands were not clean of my father’s slaughter, for I too was committing the same murders. Backstage during the plays of this murderer was I, waiting to receive his rations for me, food freshly gotten from his actors that portrayed the slain animals. Whenever he killed, he would feed me through him; I would use what he had stolen. And this defeated my refusal to kill.

I always refused to kill, to do what he used to do to survive. I only fed on him all those years. So many times, besides all the things he taught me, he would try to teach me the art of murder and show me the pleasure of the hunt but I would always decline such lessons. And so I became too dependent on what he would give me. I never learned to kill for food, nor would I ever want to.

Sometimes, because I was tired of everything in this life of thieving, I just wanted to stop receiving from him and wait until my soulless body gives up in hunger. But he would not let his daughter die. Never would he let me die. He had always kept me. He had looked after me ever since he took me away from that mansion where my family used to live and celebrate life, and gave me his present.

Since he wanted me by his side for eternity, he demanded my company without commanding it. It was my nature now and his that left me no choice but to submit to his visibly concealed demand. Yes, it was our nature, the nature of our kind, the nature that dictated we must stay together for no other creature was meant to be with us but ones like us, thieves and murderers. So we travelled the world; we lived ages. Together we explored the vastness of humanity and thieved it. There was no certainty on where we were headed to or where we were from. For one, I did not know what the purpose of my existence was besides being a cold company to this vicious man I called father.