I desire romance that celebrates what most have come to fear.
I’ve spent years getting drunk on the sultry secrets of real, true love. I’ve read the novels, watched the movies, lamented over lines of ponderous poetry. I’ve watched in dissatisfied silence as my peers drifted into sedated settlements built on foundations of familiarity, constructions of convenience. In my unruly twist of petal pink veins, a longing lived so brash and bold, it seemed to be a prophetic screech from the stars.
Find it. Find it. Find it.
Find love, the kind that sends your energy in a spin. Find what excites you, what sends volts of reverberant remembrance through your bones and blood. Find the enigma that is him, and follow the scent of his cinnamon and cedarwood, until — at last — you’re found.
After all these musings of strange, strange love, there came the terror. The fear and euphoria of being discovered, of becoming a face recognizable in a sea of blending ambiguity, were caught in a dizzy dance of dual extremes. Should the red thread untangle, we’d meet, each a hemisphere of their own unique world, each a comet emanating their own flavor of the cosmos.
“Who would I be… who should I be, when our orbits collide?” I thought, trembling.
In the midst of a newfound battle with my corporeal self, I sought to congeal into a creature most deserving of fairytale affections. Princes rescue princesses, after all. Princesses are perfect, aren’t they? Dainty, soft spoken, sweet. Well-mannered, agreeable, neat. Presents packed in little white boxes, swaddled in bows and drowned in diamond dust.
Surely, to earn my spell-shattering kiss, I had to purge all dragon’s blood and pump pretty pretty pretty through my system. The disembowelment was a massacre of epic proportions. I tried to bind my hair in ribbons of pastel satin and silk. I tried to line my skirts with lace, and walk on creamy kitten heels. I tried — oh, I tried — to cleanse the darkness, and to replace it with lines of liquid light. A porcelain doll, polished and pure, untouched and awaiting the fingertips of her sacred suitor.
Irony was drizzled with hilarity as I came to fear said suitor more than the monsters the stories promised he’d slay.
If I failed to balance books on my head, would he roll his eyes and stride back to his kingdom? If I showed a side more monster than maiden, would he lock me in a prison of gold and slip sweet nothings — never keys — between the bars? If I cried too hard, would he be annoyed? If I bled too easily, would he be ashamed?
What about my wings… if spread too wide, all spires and smoke, would he shoot arrows through them to ensure I stay on the ground? Would he clip them, cage me, or live to display me?
Suddenly, a new question bubbled like sea foam over the tidal waves in my mind. Had I remodeled myself for a lover I’d only ever face with timidity and trepidation? Had I created a prince so pristine, so noble on the back of his white-haired horse, only to gaze upon him with tearful eyes above ever-quivering lips?
Worse than that, had I imagined an audience of one as cruel as my insecurities had once been? In this faux, imaginal prince, I gave new life to a self-hating self I hoped I’d slain. Instead of my own voice, warped and distorted, telling me to stand straight, sit proper, and speak only sugarcane sweetness, there was this voice. Deep, honeyed deceit. A twisted mutation of me clinging so desperately to life, it crafted a mask to maintain it.
This was not my him.
I looked more closely at the romances nearest and dearest to my heart, approaching with unspoken intent to lock my lips and learn. I found that at the apex of my expectations, atop a marble pedestal of untouchable beauty, was a love story nothing like the one I’d been living by. All of my dreamiest sighs have been for those who see and seek the dark.
A love laced with pearls and perfection sat far from my desire. I thought I wanted to wear tulle and twirl through life until scooped up by a man with a kingdom of diamond and gold. This was implanted, injected into my consciousness, an inception and an amalgamation of the regurgitated beliefs of others. It was also an attempt at self-protection behind a veil of steel. It was insecurity disguised as feral fast tracks to self-improvement, improvement abiding by the rules monarchs who scratch arbitrary subjectives into scrolls destined to disintegrate.
In all honest authenticity, I never wanted a prince expectant of a princess. I never wanted a captor, a keeper, or a knight on horseback. I’ve always been a dragon in search of someone equally as supernatural to soar alongside.
We’re told it’s all about the light that bounces off our sweetest smiles, but what about the glimmer of red dripping beneath a scowl?
I want to be loved when I am pink starlight and pastel butterflies. When I am silk ribbons and delicate heel clicks. When I am fresh peonies and warm vanilla cookies. When I am new manicures and lips intoxicating as chilled rosé.
I want to be loved when there is blood caked beneath my chipped fingernails. When my hair is in knots and my throat is battle-cry ravaged. Dry lips and twitching hands. Unhinged laughter, eyes like the void. Mascara tears and knuckles painted every shade of purple.
I want to be loved when I am puddles of tears and screams of rage. When I am broken shards scattered on bloodstained tile. When I am cement cracked by sonic booms, a sky split by plasma strikes, a planet torn to shreds. When I am too weak to stand, when I am too strong to contain.
I want to be loved like the sky at the cusp of dawn, swirling with flares made buttery in atmospheric refraction. I want to be loved like the blackest hour of night, when our nitrogenous dome becomes a canopy of unseen eyes, the world a whispered wonderland of harrowing eldritch opulence. A dancing flame on a pearly white candle, and a deluge of smoke when the light dies out. The moon’s milky luminescence, and the moon’s shadowy gloom.
Beautiful; hideous. Human; monster. Life; death. Healing; hell.
I desire a love so unhinged that it celebrates what most have come to fear. I yearn for someone to trace my scars like a mosaic of salvation, to take my face between their palms, and whisper:
“You are everything, at your most lovely and most terrifying. A blessing when you feel most accursed, a gift when you suspect yourself a burden. You are beautiful when you are budding cherry blossoms, and leaves gone skeletal dripping from dead branches. You are indefinable, unexplainable. A being of horror and of heavenly wonder. I love you, when your glowing radiance lights the way, and when that radiance scorches the Earth to embers.”
We’d live in feverish reverence of one another, celebrating the darkness and the light, the evil and the good, the human and every impossible thing more. Helplessly infected with a disease so delightful, love so cruel and wonderful. Love that purifies and corrupts. One part oxygen, one part opium. Two magnificent monstrosities the world failed to slay with its notions of perfection and commands to behave, behave, behave.
We’d soar in skies of blue and of black, betwixt clouds doused in dandelion yellow and lined with violent silver lightning. We’d be happy anomalies, chasing chaos side-by-side to every unfathomable horizon. We’d be found, truly found. Two wisps of entropy speaking in tongues only the other can understand.
I yearn for love that terrifies all but the lovers. Insanity, acceptance. Delusion, devotion. Shadows, stardust, and so much more.
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