Fair maiden sleeping
While all down here are weeping;
Another of your rescuers
Is reeking, pale and cold.
Oh, don't deceive me,
Oh, don't you leave me;
Your dream is all that's keeping me
From foll'wing down that road.
Richard composed a song to the sleeping princess, and has been singing it as loud as his voice will go since sunrise. Dousing him with buckets of icy river water does nothing as he is used to being drenched with every rain storm, and his chattering teeth do not impede his volume. His cage for once is a help not a hindrance, the barbs catch or avert everything we throw at him. My temper was lost long ago.
"Be still! His mother is grieving, we are all mourning and you violate our tears with caterwauling. Have you no compassion?"
He did once. When I was about a century younger and we lived our innocent lives in our home far to the west. I thought I loved him, and I would have married him. In fact, he had obtained my father's permission and asked to speak to me privately when the minstrel began to sing. A ballad of a princess, beautiful beyond all earthly thought, sleeping in the heart of a treacherous bower of roses, awaiting her true love. A siren's song to young men; who abruptly realise their lives have slipped into the precursor of responsibility and stability, that their time for adventure is quietly dwindling. So he left and I followed. For love, I suppose. I hardly remember now.
My love holds me here, my sweetest joy –
A hey ho, the wind and the rain;
I know, to Fate, I'm but a toy –
And the rain, it raineth every day.
"What holds you here is the consequence of your own rash arrogance and stupidity, you fool. Your princess is a figment of your imagination. If she ever existed, she is long gone, crumbled to dust; remembered only by the wind whistling through the abandoned rooms that were once her home. You are in love with a phantom, a wraith who lures young men to their wretched deaths."
"And you are in love with a dead man." He smiles cruelly. "Tell me, little girl, is your heart breaking?"
"Of course, every minute of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of."
I am a fool.
Cale once told me that there is only one distinction between comedy and tragedy. A tragedy is the last act of a man and a comedy all the scenes that went before. A tragedy concludes where a comedy continues. Tragedy breeds despair, comedy fosters hope.
If I truly believed my life is a tragedy, I would throw myself upon the thorns that took my beloved.
Never to laugh again, never to cry again.
Deeper than love did he die. I cannot reach him.
Perhaps, I did not love him enough, he tells me.
I followed once for love, I think I did.
The road will be a comfort after waiting so long.
The rain, it raineth every day. It will tomorrow too.
Finita la commedia. Conclude the comedy.
I don't want to. I don't.
I am ten kinds of fool.