CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I suppose if you liked you could divide this story in halves- the first half, wherein you met me and where I upheld the stereotype of the tortured monster, obedient to the archetype: the locked door, the fearfulness, the complex rapport with my caretakers, the resistance of my own true form. Perhaps you viewed me as misunderstood. Perhaps you felt sympathy for me. Probably, when I fell in love, you recalled how these hoary narratives usually run, and you knew I was doomed far before I did.
Now we are inside the second half. Common in fairytales are these beasts who escape their hybridity, who ascend into an essential humanness, whose binary curse is lifted as reward. Mine is not that story. If anything, I've discovered my own essential humanness to be callous, selfish, hobbled by regrets. Particularly I regret that I could not manage to love in full because I wouldn't bring the beast along.
So, then, the denouement: it is the end of the story, and the beast holds tight the curse.