Fairy Tales Can Kiss My Ass (Jorge Arturo - New Orleans, LA)

 

 

You were so certain when you got tucked into bed every night that the fairy tale stories rocking you to sleep would be waiting around the corner; waiting to cradle you in their ancient hands and see you through to your happy ending. And it was a naïve smile that learned to settle on your lips as you watched pieces of that magical story get chiseled away, and reshaped, and often even annihilated by the road put out in front of you. So maybe the mother didn’t survive. Maybe the father was too preoccupied with his own grief to remember the teary-eyed child begging him for for safety.  Maybe you didn’t grow up beautiful. Maybe you didn’t grow up strong. Maybe when you sang songs they were out of pitch, and no forest critters came soaring to your aid.

But, if nothing else, the fairy tale promised romance, you assured yourself – a savior atop a white steed who braved through the tragedy and saw someone worth saving on the other side of it. And you were so desperate for some part of this story to be true that you served your heart up on a silver platter. Only that man was no knight or savior. He was poisoned by the tendrils of his own broken fairy tale, and the only way he knew how to fight through was to fight you. Control you. Demean you. Lock you back in the tower you’d been so desperate to be free of. You mustered what courage you had left to demand your freedom from this supposed knight, at which he brandished his weapon at you and then tossed it at your feet. You weren’t worth saving, and no one else was coming to do it.

If the fairy godmother was keeping score, that’s no parents, no freedom from the tragic backstory, no knight in shining armor, and you were back up in the tower that you were this close to escaping. And you know what? That bitch didn’t show up, either, no matter how many water features you cried over. But after nights of weeping and wondering how everything could have gone so wrong, you spotted the glint of the shoddy sword kicked aside by the door. You considered the symbolism of using anything that atrocious man owned, but decided the literary implications could wait.

You picked it up. It was heavy and unfamiliar in your hands. More than you initially thought you could bare.

But you remembered every shred of pain you ever felt, every rejection, every disappointment, and you lifted that sword high over your head, and swung. CRACK. You noticed the tears forming in your eyes. You raised it again and swung. CRACK. That imposing door you’d faced your entire life was starting to fall apart, like you had so many times. This time you raised the sword even higher. You thought of the promises those fairy tales made you, how they’d let you down and you swung. The door fell apart before you.

And while you weren’t tired, or unsteady, or unburdened, you could finally inhale the fresh air of the world around you and knew that for once, for the very first time, you were free.

You’d rescued yourself. And with the sword in hand, you gazed across the expanse of forest, out at all the tall towers peppering the distance, and you knew deep in your heart: you could help so many others. Not by rescuing them gallantly in some broken fairy tale way, but by showing them that the power of their “happily ever afters” wasn’t in loving homes, or gallant knights, or fairy godmothers. The power was in  a glimmer of fight that existed inside them all along.