Struggles and Growth in a Troubled Marriage

THE MONSTER

I think about the moments that have passed me

since I met you, and the moments that led to my death which you created.

Not a physical death, but a death of the heart.

There's something about love that kills a man, especially when it was so innocent.

Am not saying I was an innocent man

but my love was pure because it had the best intentions.

I wasn't like those men: the playboys or careless men who toyed with women.

And your right,

I was dangerous,

a damned motherfucker with a blood hand.

I would take anyone without a second thought.

But you can't condemn me, my life was hard,

the enemies in my face were cocksuckers,

they took what they wanted by force,

and I took from them, so of course I had to be strong.

Do I regret anything? no,

in this life you live without regrets.

I can't see you face to face, wish I could,

but maybe it's better,

who knows if I would smash your face in a wall.

A monster can only love like a monster,

that's what they called me, but honestly, I could care less about titles or tags.

I lived to survive and i couldn't follow the rules,

but i have a question for you.

If you didn't have to follow the rules, would you?

This people call you "Queen Of England."

They act like they love you,

like they share your cares,

they can't pretend properly

and you can't hate them properly.

That's why you search for distractions like me.

And maybe your a monster like me,

a different kind, the deceptive kind of monster that devours, destroys and disappears.

You lie to yourself, I accept who i am.

I remember the trees of Maradosa,

and the whirlwind of Zimbabwe.

The short-term freedom we enjoyed there,

the joy in your eyes, the sex in your thighs,

such wildness that was undefined.

I gave you the excitement that young girls dream of.

What a shameless queen you are,

oh what the people will say,

now you think about such things?

back then you didn't.

I watch the days pass by,

i hear the whispers,

but my mind feels dull.

I imagine myself approaching your tower,

killing all the guards,

taking you away,

maybe that would make me feel alive,

create some kind of tension in my heart,

this dullness, this boredom is not me.

However, this is the reality of losing you,

the reality of the life of a monster who loves a Queen.

Pain is a bitch i am used to.

But this feeling of loss is new,

because I never cared for anything.

It made me the most deadly enemy,

but now it's different.

I actually feel like i lost something.

This is also the reality of being weak.

The reality of the life of a monster torn between love and hate.

You said destruction and death follow me everywhere i go, but what about you?

The Queen who has to sacrifice some peasants to keep her throne.

The Queen who has killed for the nobles, taken their bribery and jailed them.

The Queen who fucks a secret man and does everything for her own selfish self.

What about you my Queen?

This is my reply to your request.

I will never give up my desire or my thoughts for you.

If you can't love me, then you have to kill me,

if you can't kill me, then i will love you.

THE QUEEN

I will tell you first how i spend my days since we concluded our excitements.

I wake up in the morning, i don't talk much,

i don't smile, i eat quietly and i stare at the skies,

the birds, the fishes and the suitors.

I get irritated talking talking for too long.

I get tired of my suitors.

They all act like proper men,

speaking the best words,

maintaining proper manners,

while boasting sufficiently of their achievements.

Sometimes I enjoy toying with them,

playing with their ambitions,

it's all a game to them.

When they see me, they see influence, lands, power and sex.

I don't blame them,

they were born, groomed, prepared, trained and strengthened to claim power.

But why do I endure it?

This madness, this greed that surrounds me.

Because I have to?

Because I believe in duty?

No, because this is the best life I can live.

My monster,

i love you, i cherish you, but think about this:

I was born a princess without a brother for a prince.

What other choice do I have?

What better life could I live?

If I runaway with you, what life would it be?

If I should predict,

we would be poor,

We would be violent and eventually bored.

Poor because you have nothing to sustain me.

Violent because the royal guard would be after us.

Bored because it would all be pointless at the end.

What is love?

What is death?

What is life?

This are the questions I ask myself.

I sometimes tell the piano man to play me a tune,

a sad tune.

So I can think about our love, our guilt and our pain.

We had the best time of my life.

But like a wise man once said "All good things must come to an end."

That wise man, was you,

and i bet you don't remember.

But those were your words when you left me for war.

You wanted blood so bad, you denied love,

you broke my heart, my soul, my hope,

Because you were delusional.

You expected that I would always be there.

waiting for you, desiring you,

feeling horny at the thought of you,

but life is a rushing wind,

and I am one of it's particles.

What is love?

What is death?

What is life?

This are the questions I wonder about.

I think time reveals a man to himself.

I think it brings out the demons and angels in us.

That's what it did to me.

I always thought I was normal, like all the the little princesses with fine dreams of marriage.

I forced my thoughts to be like theirs.

I forced myself to believe that what I needed was a perfect prince from a foreign country.

I forced my hope to be like theirs.

I forced myself to believe that I wanted my marriage to bring a powerful ally to my family.

I forced my desire to be like theirs.

I forced myself to believe that I needed to please my country to be happy with myself.

But deep down I was just a rebel, a selfish, horny and erratic rebel who wanted to break the rules.

Why do we follow the rules?

Why do we care about the rules?

I remember the first time I saw you take a man's life.

It was one of those dark nights.

When I would attempt to run away and change my mind halfway.

Why did you kill that man?

Out of anger? Stupid jealousy?

He was going to help us runaway?

But you killed him because he made me laugh.

Love is chaos.

Love is madness.

Love is desire.

Love perhaps is what you make of it.

I loved you because you were wild.

I desired you because you took me by force.

You broke through my insecurities.

You drove me to madness,

and you were going to take me to hell.

You were right about everything.

About who I am,

The things I've done,

The peasants who have died, the nobles who have bribed, the love we shared that died.

My monster, the man of my dreams,

the only man who could scare me and love me at the same time.

My intentions were never to hurt you, but I had to see the reality of what we were at one point or another.

I can't tell you to stop loving me.

I can't tell you I don't love you.

I can't hate you.

I can't kill you, but I don't want you.

Fire and ice define our worlds,

two separate worlds without a meeting point.

Your great strength cannot change that fact.

To our people your a criminal,

a strange man,

a reminder of our dark past,

the monster of the underground.

Think about this,

if I wasn't in the palace would you still be free man?

isn't the picture clear enough?

I love you enough to stay away from you.

THE DELIVERY BOY

I delivered the letter of the monster to my Queen

then I delivered his reply to her.

I am the delivery boy,

the middle man,

bearer of all secrets,

the unnoticed toad, but the closest thing the Queen has to a friend.

I was initially born a prince in my country.

But i was born blind.

So i was discarded as a curse.

No prince had ever been born blind,

so i became a beggar.

Due to my blindness my senses are very powerful.

So I could feel everything around me.

That was how I learned to fight.

And that was how I survived.

But this is not the story of the beggar who became a delivery boy to the most powerful Queen to ever exist.

It is the story of the beggar who brought the Queen her most powerful and deepest heart desire "LOVE."

Love is a mystery,

a game,

perhaps a dagger,

sometimes it's a trick,

a story,

perhaps a lie,

but above all things, I believe that love is a monster of pain.

How can something be so beautiful yet so painful?

How can something create so much joy and hurt?

How can love begin? Then why does it end?

I used to love once,

But my love is a useless story i tell myself.

The great love of my Queen is the story I tell to harmless idiots on the streets who no one will believe.

I met my Queen in a perilous situation

under a hidden identity.

Trying to enjoy the pleasure of common people

in a house filled with male prostitutes.

There was something about the wildness and naked men surrounding her that thrilled her.

She was half drunk when she approached me, and while dropping some money in my beggar pot she poured her vomit on me.

There was no apology for vomiting on me because she fainted right in front me, she was wasted.

Everyone knew about the night bandits in our country.

They were deadly criminals on wild horses that would strike at an unexpected moment, kill everyone and take everything.

The last thing you wished for when the night bandits struck was an unconscious drunk girl lying on the cold ground in front of you.

I contemplated my next move as a blind beggar with a survival instinct, the easy option was to leave her there to die, but I chose different.

I chose the hard option, I tried to save her.

I tried to wake her up, she woke up but she wasn't herself, so I put a hard slap on her right cheek and I pointed to the bandits.

We both ran for our lives, but I knew we could only escape death if mother luck was dancing on our heads.

We didn't have that luck, and we were surrounded in a few minutes.

My only option was to fight the bandits.

I've fought men before, countless times, mostly for money, never once did I fight killers, this was my first time and there was a difference.

When you fight someone as a normal person, taking a life is not an option, but this bandits were killers, taking my life was the first option.

They say mother luck is a gentle old woman with a bright smile and a sad face.

Watching over the living and laughing at their foolishness.

Once in a while she bestows her luck on those who may or may not deserve it. That night, mother luck sprinkled her luck on my life.

Perhaps mother luck really didn't care about me, but she cared about the Queen who was about to die after the bandits beat me half dead.

The royal army came out of nowhere with bows and arrows killing all the night bandits except those who escaped.

They were searching for the Queen as was required of them, but they could easily not have found us or they could have found her dead.

It was mother luck at her best.

Can you imagine a beggar who enters the palace with a smile on his face, wounds on his chest, a scar on his back, and a broken leg.

That was me.

From that night I remained in the palace serving my Queen, observing her words and reactions, until I noticed something.

There was a quiet sadness that fell on her when she was approached by rich suitors with different agendas whom she would always reject.

All her servants knew about it but no one dared to ask why.

When I was nothing but an ordinary man in the streets, I used to believe my fellow ordinary men when they would say the Queen does not have a heart.

But when I got close to the Queen I realized she had a heart as deep as a well and in this well, there were secrets, desires and thoughts.