I have always been a strange person.
This is me at an age when i was at my happiest. When i felt free for the first time, and when i lived in a little cottage haunted by a ghost named Evelyn and her dog, Piccolo, and i still thought i could kiss inanimate objects to life. I was prettier then. Before Life happened...
I have never been attracted to people the way most people are. I have experienced lust based on the physical appearance of an actual human only three times in my life that i can recall. From a young age, i have been attracted to different things. I lusted after humanlike creatures that don't exist in this world. And the one i have longed for the most over the years, the Beast.
In story books i crossed out the ending where he turned into a prince. I hated it. To me, princes are ugly. The Beast is where beauty is. When the Beauty and the Beast show reruns came on in the 90s, with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton, i watched every episode like i lived for them.
I have never known how to explain it. Why i am not attracted to humans. Why i am only attracted to monsters. I prefer men to women, romantically. But sexually i like them both. I can tell when someone is attractive. I'm an artist and i love beautiful people, as well as strange, unusual or ugly people, for different reasons. But whether it is an attractive or unattractive man that approaches me, i am physically attracted to neither.
A personality can make someone more or less attractive to me, by A LOT. And there are certain physical traits i do find appealing. Monsters and beasts are big, bigger than i am. So i like height. I like beards. Beasts have manes. I like long hair. I like people who look different from me. Tattoos and piercings, a different skin tone, a different culture. Anything that makes him seem otherworldly will work in his favour. Anything that makes him less human,
more like something else,
something better.
Or more human. Too human. People who know people, who have an ability to understand and empathize but maintain the inner strength it takes to survive that and look out for themselves and their loved ones,
i like those people.
Although after what i have been through, nothing will ever beat kindness.
As far as that natural, primal, physical attraction goes, however, that thing that everyone seems to feel towards someone, towards some kind of person somewhere,
i feel toward no one.
Today i saw a picture of the Black Forest.
In my dreams, this is where the Beast lives. He lives in a castle house, a castle cottage, in the Black Forest of Germany. And from there he dreams of me too. But we never sleep at the same time. So our dreams always miss each other.
One night,
after being alone for some time
in my little haunted cottage in a corner wood in Washington
i dreamt that he had found me. He took me to his castle house in the Black Forest of Germany.
We lived there together for many years. And i was finally happy. All the years of our life together i dreamed in such detail. We were married {something i have no desire to do in real life with a human man}, and we had children {something i definitely don't want to do in real life with a human man} and we grew older together. We never spent more than a few hours apart from one another. And we never needed to.
Then one day, it was was his 500th birthday. Half way to 1000 years. It seemed like a big deal. I wanted to surprise him, so i snuck off to town without him to pick up a special gift i had ordered some time before. It took the whole day
and when i returned he was dead.
Years ago when he had been with Beauty, a spell had been cast on him. He had never been a man or a prince, but was cursed all the same. The spell made it so that if he was parted from the one he loved for more than three weeks he would die. When Beauty left him, it had taken him two weeks and six days to separate his heart from hers. And afterward, he was never certain whether the three week time period would start over should he fall in love again, or if he would only have the one day left.
He never wanted me to feel pressured to stay with him, he never wanted to think that i was there because i didn't want to kill him by leaving. He wanted to know i was there because i loved him and that was all. But the morning i left, i had not told him, and he didn't know why i had gone, and he grew afraid and worried and that fear triggered the curse
and i came home just a few minutes too late.
In the very beginning of my dream, i was in trouble. I lived in a small settlement with several others and we were under attack. The ghost of my Beast with an army of ghosts behind him came to our rescue. When i saw him, the life we once had together flashed before my eyes and my mind flooded with the memories of us. It had been several years since his death, and our whole history washed over me. I wept and cried out and asked him, Why didn't you tell me about the spell that was cast on you? And he told me. He told me how perhaps he should have, but he needed to know i was there because i wanted to be, and not for any other reason.
He helped us. He and his ghost army fought off our attackers. And then he and his ghosts disappeared, back into the Otherworld.
When i woke up i was remarkably devastated.
All the emotions were so real. I cried, i was so heartbroken.
I cried for days.
Literally.
I remembered sleeping next to him
for twenty+ years.
I remembered waking up beside him. Spending my life with him.
I remembered it all so clearly. Like it had been real. Like it was really real.
It was a cruel trick.
And the cruelest part
was that it could never happen
in real life.
What hurt the most was knowing
i would never find someone i would love
or want
as much as i did him.
I'm older now, and i believe i could love a human that much, despite my peculiarities. But i haven't yet. And certainly no human has ever loved me that much.
Some days suffering that dream, i wrote a small story about it. I posted here a few months ago:
Beauty was a Metaphor
And while a good ten years have passed since that time, and that dream, my feelings remain for the most part, unchanged. Still i am convinced that
i am someone who will never know true love.
I have always been a strange person.
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