Nicholas asked for writing topics earlier today. In my laziness, I decided the most evil thing to ask for would be for his interpretation of me. This was my reply:
Once upon a time, there was a princess. She lived in a fairy tale castle and kept waiting for her prince to come. In the meantime she tried kissing some frogs, but they never turned into anything (except for the one time when it was really a toad and she ended up hallucinating for the rest of the evening.) While she waited, she found herself wondering why she was waiting for a prince in the first place. Why princes? What was so wonderful about princes? And why did she have to wait for them? She thought about it some more and decioded that she might as well go and try to find the prince, because he sure as hell wasn’t coming. One day she climbed out of her bedroom window and climbed on down into the World.
So we all looked for her, of course, but nobody knows where she’s gone. Time walked on, we grew up and somewhere out there the princess is hiding.
Maybe she’s the lady behind the counter of the antique store, collecting unconsidered trifles.
Maybe she’s the girl with the pasties on her nipples from the sleezy peeler bar down on Fourth and McQueen.
Maybe she’s hiding in the bookstore down the road, the girl with the dust-covered lenses and off-colored hair showing her roots sitting behind the counter.
Maybe she’s your best friend, the one with the run down old house in the middle of nowhere and a garden covered in blackberry vines. The one that you drink green tea with, that you talk to about books and life and each other’s love lives, and the one that you never think of as anything else but, y’know, her. The one you go to parties with because neither of you have anybody else, and everybody else thinks you’re a couple and you laugh about it because you know it would never work out; she’s still waiting for a prince after all these years.
Maybe she’s the girl you wake up next to in the morning – there’s an unfamiliar pair of cold feet in the bed and a pair of nipples jabbing into your back and an arm around your chest, and you panic and relax because, oh, right, it’s just her, and you curl up and go back to sleep. In the morning – homemade Eggs Benedict and pan fries, wearing bathrobes and sitting on the porch. Five days later and you still can still smell her perfume on your body. “Call me,” she says, and you do for once.
Maybe you never see her. You stop by the castle and she’s gone, and you never find her again. Too late for you, you should have gone looking for her years ago. The castle’s fallen down now, a pile of rubble. Years from now archeologists will crawl over its corpse.
Down on the street that they call Death Row, it’s another day. The old man with the guitars strum and croak and croon, the pretty spanish boys drive by on their bicycles and the boozers and beggars sit on the sidewalk and try to remember who they once were. Somebody puts on a gramaphone record – Le Quintet Du Hot Club de France – and we can hear strings and brass weaving their way out onto the street.