Chaos In A Bottle

A fairy tale for you. Like all fairy tales, it offers a lesson…

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was neither beautiful nor daring. She kept her home and tended her children, and she longed for someone to share the quiet things.

One day, while walking the strange place where people shared pictures, she found a beast. He’d been wounded, and her heart hurt for him, because she’d felt those same arrows of betrayal herself in the past. So, she ignored the claws and offered herself, and pulled out little pieces of her own heart to bandage his wounds. She held him close, heedless of the blood that soaked her clothing, unafraid of the demons that never strayed far from his side.

For many months, she petted his soul and tried as best as she could to heal his hurts. His smiles made her laugh, and sometimes, when alcohol or exhaustion had loosened his tongue, he told her things that made her shiver. How he craved her touch, how amazed he was that she not only didn’t fear his demons, but danced with them. How he wanted to protect her. Those rare times kept her going when he ignored her, put up a wall against her in the picture place, didn’t answer when she called out for help because of her own hurts. He was a beast, after all, and it would take time for him to open. Surely he’d grow to value her love more than the likes and catcalls from random strangers at the picture place – after all, wouldn’t any sane beast realize that those fed his ego, but she offered to satiate his soul?

So she kept pulling out little pieces of her heart to give him when he hurt, even though it became more and more painful to do so, because she received nothing in return with which to patch up her own wounds. She hid her scars from her children and tried to go on, because her beast said he needed her. And because she loved him.

Finally, though, she broke. Wounded and bleeding, she reached out to him. He looked at her, and told her it was too messy. That he wasn’t ready to give her back any of what she’d given him. He valued her, he said, just not enough to brave the blood.

And he left her to patch her own wounds and defend her own dying heart.

It’d be way too easy to say the moral here was to be careful where you give your heart. I think, though, that perhaps there is a different one.

You see, if you wait until you’re “ready” for happiness, you’ll never actually find it. In reality, it comes when you’re willing to wade through the gore to snatch it from the mess that is life. Grab it when it comes, not when you think you’re ready. It’s the fight that MAKES you ready.

I don’t know how the above story will end. I don’t know if the beast will realize what he lost. I do know that the woman, who was neither beautiful nor daring, is in fact very brave.

And the beast is a complete and utter idiot.