I sit on my throne, rejecting every girl that comes in my way. None of them were up to par.
My name is Prince Henry, and at the ‘royal’ ball I had to choose a girl to dance with. I had recently asked my father if that couldn’t be a thing, because that is just plain awkward. I felt bad for the girls. Imagine if you’d step up to a man-eating shrimp on a throne in all your livelihood and all he said to you was ‘no’. Come on, screw royal ball this is a royal pain in the ass.
I didn’t even want to dance with anybody in the first place. My plan was to reject every single one of them and be like, ‘Oh, no! I guess none of them were up to my standards.’ I just wanted to eat shrimp. Is that too much to ask for as a literal prince?
But then my father whispered that indeed, I had to pick at least one. I sighed and randomly said yes.
I didn’t even get to see her when I said yes, but I was sort of glad I did. This maiden had blond hair and a blue dress. She was actually beautiful. So, as the prince, I got up and danced. It was beautiful. The dance and the girl. I felt like I actually found the one. My princess.
The evening was grand, but midnight was coming soon, and Cinderella was beginning to frantic. I kept asking what was wrong, but she didn’t answer. All of a sudden, right before midnight, she fled back to her coach as if I had the black plague. She dropped one of her slippers.
“Cinderella!” I yelled, as her coach fled.
I groaned. I finally thought that I had found the person of my dreams. But right when I was going to ask her, she left with little explanation. I had to find her. I looked down and saw a glass slipper. The glass slipper that she wore.
Aha! I can use that to-
Crunch.
A metal shoe stepped on the slipper! All my hopes were officially gone. Looking up, it was a royal knight who had stepped on it.
“Ooh,” the knight exclaimed, recoiling backwards, “Was this. . .yours? Yikes, sorry man.”
My eyebrows twitched. I, Prince Henry, was on my knees looking up at a knight. I couldn’t see any bit of his face, but I could tell he was at least a bit sorry.
“Here, uh, I mean it’s not totally broken,” the knight slowly bent down at sifted through the broken pieces. “Oh, nope, it’s pretty done. I mean, you’re the prince, so I guess you can. . . buy a new one?”
I sighed, completely ignoring him. “I’ll never see her again.” I put my head in my hands.
“Oh, this wasn’t yours?”
I looked up from my hands. Who was this knight? Had I seen him before? Was he new? And what on earth did he just ask me?
“Uh, no? No, this wasn’t mine. It belonged to a maiden who just recently ran off,” I huffed, standing up. The knight stood up too.
“Rejection,” the knight said but fell silent when he turned his head towards me and saw my face.
“You’re the goddamn knight who stepped on it in the first place!” I yelled out of pure anger, stepping right in front of him and pointing towards his chest.
The knight took a step backwards. “Er, sorry, prince. Prince Henry. Sir,” the knight suddenly stammered, knowing his job could be taken in a second.
“I can, uh, I can make this right! I can find her! What did she look like?” he continued.
“Blond hair, blue dress, blue eyes, fair skin. . . You won’t be able to find her for a year,” I huffed.
“What if I can?” he answered, suddenly determined. I could hear it in his voice. “Let’s go! Here, follow me. I’ve patrolled through the city many times.”
And so, in the early morning, we left the gates of the castle. The knight was speed walking, and I almost had to jog to catch up with him.
“Blond hair, blue dress, blue eyes,” he kept repeating to himself as we walked. Usually, the royal ball would last a whole day and would span all the way to the city, so you would see women in dresses for at least half a mile. This is both good and bad. Good because everybody’s out, bad because everybody’s out. You could’ve guessed how many looks I’ve gotten by just walking down the street.
I found it kind of interesting to see how determined this knight was. First, he went up to the dress shopkeeper, which would’ve seen thousands of maidens that day.
“Have you met a girl named. . .”
The knight turned towards me.
“Cinderella,” I answered.
“Named Cinderella?” the knight continued with hope in his voice. “Blue eyes, blond hair, blue dress?”
“Oh, I’ve met plenty of ladies who look like that, but none with the name Cinderella.”
My heart sinks, but we still had a ways to go.
Off we went, saying the same name and looks to every shop keeper and restaurant owner we could find. My feet were getting to be tired, and all my hope was just about gone. The mysterious knight was determined, by I don’t know what, to find Cinderella. I had a feeling we weren’t going to find her here, and I had a feeling he knew too. Which I found confusing-why he would still spend that much time with me to find someone we knew we weren’t going to find.
“I’m sorry, I can’t go on. We’re not going to find her,” I said, once the streets were becoming emptier.
The knight turned around. He stood in front of me, his eyes doing I don’t know what. I couldn’t see his face, which I hated. “Here, well um, we can’t let this beautiful morning go to waste, can we, sir?”
The way he addressed me made my heart thump. “What do you have in mind?”
The knight waved his hand to signal that we were moving. My feet hurt like the heavens, but I wasn’t about to complain. As we walked further away from the wealthier parts of town, I came to the conclusion that this is where he lived. Or use to live, before he became a knight. I also realized that I didn’t love Cinderella.
I was in love with being in love.
I followed the knight, feeling a bit bad. Even if we did eventually find Cinderella, our relationship wouldn’t be the best. I was also wondering where the knight was taking me. Our area kept getting worse and worse, the houses looking more damaged than ever. The roofs were dented, some even had holes. Dogs sat and stared, their ribs almost poking through.
“This is where I spent most of my life,” the knight declared, which I had already figured out by now.
“Where are we going?” I asked, my eyes frantically looking around me.
“To a place where I would find peace as a kid, and hopefully you will too. It also has a magnificent view of the sunrise, sir,”
“You can stop calling me ‘sir’,” I answered, hesitantly.
“Ok, prince.”
“No, no ‘prince’ either. We’re not in a castle. Just. . .just Henry.”
The knight stopped in place. I don’t think he’d ever called a royal by their first name. He didn’t call me Henry, after that. I bet he found that hard. I didn’t even know his own name. He continued walking forward.
“What’s yours?” I asked in the burning silence.
“. . .August.”
Suddenly, August became quieter than ever before. His walking became stiff, I noticed. I didn’t know what I did. I wanted him to go back to before, for some reason.
Soon, we approached a garden. A garden! To think, in all of this, there would be a beautiful, bustling garden with flowers of all shapes and sizes. It was really beautiful. August weaved through the path, knowing exactly where he was going. I figured he had gone here many times before.
In the middle of the garden, sat a bench overlooking the horizon, surrounded by flowers.
“Over here, Henry,” August finally said. I was glad he said my name.
We both sat down on the bench, and for a while, nobody said anything. For some reason, I felt really close to him. Close enough to say, “I don’t think I actually loved her, August,” I declared, looking down at my feet. “I was just drunk on the thought of love.”
It was silent again, the only thing you could hear being the sound of metal rustling as August shifted in his seat.
“So. . .you were just lonely?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I was. I never thought about that. I guess I was.” I genuinely never thought about that. I always thought that I was okay being alone.
“I can relate with being lonely,” August stated. And with that, he took off his helmet. His face was sharp compared to his boyish voice. I didn’t care. Our eyes met, and finally, I saw him smile. He looked down again as if he’d made a mistake.
“I used to come to this garden, as a boy, because my mother was never to be seen and my father a menace. In this garden, I was surrounded by life. It was nice.”
When he shared his, I felt obligated to share my side of the story. “You’d think a prince would have all the company in the world, but it gets lonely in that castle. All the people in there are just a bunch of fakes. I jumped on top of the first real girl I met. I guess I just never learned how to love.”
A breeze swept by, and the flowers all did their own dance. The sun started to rise, casting beautiful hues of oranges and reds and yellows across our faces. I could tell August was thinking. Thinking about something to say? The sun slowly crept above the horizon of hills.
In all of that beauty, as if to give a lonely prince a heart attack, August whispered, “I can teach you how to love.”
It felt like time stopped around us, the sun stopped rising, the breeze stopped flowing, my heat stopped pumping. August reached around my body and his hands slowly guided my jaw towards his and he kissed me.
It didn’t go farther than our mouths touching each other, but I felt a lightning bolt in my chest. I breathed out. I didn’t know I was holding my breath.
I watched August’s eyes open again and he smiled. “How was that for your first lesson?”
“Perfect.”
I leaned again and kissed him as the sun rised.
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