Minotaur

We think we know beauty when we see it. In a woman`s face, in the curves of her body. In the sun sinking beyond the ocean or the flowers that pry themselves out of the softening ground each spring. But real beauty is a mystery. The ninnows that dart away just before you glance into the shallows. The lightning that flashes in a desert somewhere across the world and destroys nothing -- a victimless display of power. It`s whatever makes us wish for happiness, even as the world offers us tragedy upon tragedy. It`s not just in a woman`s face, but in what she touches and how. The way the air and earth respond to her. It is in her fear as well as her courage. Courage without fear is simply recklessness.

Our story is very simple.
A girl who was scared loved one who was brave. A girl fool enough to try to play hero saw the underlying hornlessness of monsters. And in a sweet shock of ruin, two women found forgiveness, and they held each other in the wreckage left by one for whom forgiveness meant nothing. That is a tale ornery in its rejection of heroes, in its changeable villain, in its unwillingness to yield to invention.
Perhaps the broadest of all imaginations is the mind that ruly sees what`s in front of it.

I am still not sure what we are. We have never untangled or tried to match our ideas about love, fidelity, and gratitude. I don`t know if I am something she treasures or if I am simply a shelf above loneliness, where she sits and looks down at a void that dares her, coaxes her to lean forward. But I know she keeps me from feeling like I am meeting wall after wall. I think she is more beautiful than she has ever been, and that her beauty is featureless, magnificent, something beyond the body. I hope that if I was ever destined for anything, it was to lie beside her.

I have indeed made a sacrifice, it seems. I sacrificed my chance to be human, complicated, weak and lovely both. I have seen so many people overlook what I was -- an orphan, a crook, a tough in love with her own fists -- in favor of the image of me as a warrior. The girl who set out to slay the Minotaur and succeeded.
I do not want the truth gone from me. I do not want only stories. What stories do to heroes is edge out the things that make them bravest -- their insecurities and wrongdoings, their trashing-tailed desire for self-preservation. The way they sharpen their love with a quiet, occasional contempt for the object of it. We paing heroes in broad strokes -- nameable virtues and forgivable flaws. They brood, yes, but they are never paralyzed by self-loathing. They kill, but only monsters.
When I first read my tale in a book, I marveled at the stranger in those pages, like a starlet seeing a photo of herself with all her pimples painted out.

When you fall in love with someone, you fall in love not only with her face and eyes and heart, but with her vision of the world. Love leaves no room to stand back and pity another`s delusions. You share them. You join hands lying down and draw an arc across the sky and tell a story about what a cloud looks like, a story that becomes your shared truth.
But what of the pieces of her you don`t understand? The notes in her voice you cannot hit with your own? The words she uses, but that you cannot remember the meaning of? I wasn`t sure what I wanted in that moment -- to share everything with her, or to take back my secrets and begin again in a version of our story where I was aloof and intriguing. Where she begged to know me, but I gave her nothing but cool stares and cryptic promises.

Each day during lessons and chores, I told myself this would be the night I placed my hand somewhere other than her shoulder. The night I would have the courage to hold her, to touch her. And yet each night, one of us drew away in the middle of a kiss, and we both lay on our backs, staring at the ceiling. I began to whisper to myself that I was in love. That I was in love in the way of knights and poor young men who could not offer the princess riches but who had good hearts and trusty, knob-kneed horses. And suddenly I was furious with those tales, because love was not as simple as singing a song under a maid`s window or breaking her up into poetry and spitting her at empty rooms.
Love had a current of shame running through it, and in a way it seemed lonelier than just about anything.