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It starts like this: Once upon a time (which is a terrible way to start a story that will one day be called trite and overdone), there was an Emperor. And he loved a princess, because these stories are always about royalty until they aren’t.
He loved her too much, or maybe not enough. And she loved him, too, but like every good tragedy
there was love, and it wasn’t enough.
So she dies. History will say she died for the love of him, but I will tell you the truth. She died because of him, because there’s never so great a force as love, because nothing lasts.
The world does not exist.
You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
So it starts like this: There’s a girl, and she’s very small. She’s seen her whole family slaughtered in front of her before she’s seen six summers, and she’s alone in the world. Until she meets him: a boy as gangly as her, with joints sharp like knives and a wit twice as keen.
It’s a love story, so of course she loves him. Loves him as much as a child can love anything, loves him until they’re both grown up and someone else comes along.
They both love him.
They both love him with a devotion that would move mountains and burn everything around them and make the world kneel at their feet.
And she dies for him. She doesn’t die, actually, but she does in all the ways that matter. One sleeps, one sleeps inside himself, and she sleeps as one waking, there but not.
She dies not out of love for him but out of fear, but what is fear but love tinged with horror, and what can she do but destroy the only ones she’s ever loved?
It’s not a very good story.
She loves them, still, for decades. She loves them until she can’t anymore, which is to say she loves them until all of them are dead.
And even then, it might continue.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
It starts like this, too: A general meets a boy, half a man but not quite, with one foot in this realm and one in another. She isn’t sure what love is, but she thinks the kindness he shows her (a sly smile when he passes a bottle to her, the slide of his wine-drunk lips against hers, the feel of his dry and cracked hands in her calloused ones) is something akin to the forces that hold the world together.
So, it might not be love.
She thinks it might be something better.
She’s not in love with him. She might not even love him in the way that people should. But they try, imperfectly, anyway.
And he betrays her. He doesn’t, really. But when she stands there with her home burning and her people burning and something deep inside her burning-
how is it not a betrayal that he doesn’t die with her?
She doesn’t love him, but she loves him enough to live and enough to die and enough to push the little girl with a mischievous smile like his away from her and into the arms of her cousin (whom she loves more than anything, more than life and more than the Phoenix) and towards something that might not be safe forever but is safe for now.
So this story doesn’t end well, either. Most of them don't.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
It ends like this: She’s everything and nothing, the start and end of the universe. She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in, a phoenix reborn from the ashes of what might’ve been and rising into what is.
It ends with a girl who grows up hard, who’s traded every bit of softness in her heart for armor, who can’t love him because she’s never been taught how. And it ends with a boy who can’t love her because it isn’t allowed but oh gods it doesn’t stop his heart from straining for her.
It ends with a kiss. It doesn’t, but when he tells the story he likes to think it ends with one anyway, a grand and romantic thing that might carry into the annals of history to prove
there was love, and it wasn’t enough.
It ends with a knife to the back, a knife to the chest, a knife forever stuck in his heart.
It ends as all good tragedies do. She dies for love.
(She doesn’t, actually, but that’s how they’ll remember her.)
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.