Her Royal Cleverness!

            You are nothing like the amorous animals I have encountered all my life. And she is nothing like me.

            It’s an innocuous setting. She’s there, you’re there. I’m invited. Instantly, my Hollywood breeding comes out and bites me in the behind. The build up of the week breaks its fragile dam and the waters of unreasonable and unintended anger surge.

            She’s all that I would like to be. Pleasant and smiling. She’s got a quirky beauty that instantly wraps itself around your senses and all that you’d like to do is listen to her cleverness. Oh, her shining cleverness. She’s at ease with herself and I find myself on yet another trip to the fringes of self exile, a banishment that I imagine for myself.

            You seem so happy. There are no lines on your face; none of the haggard uncertainty that clouds your brow, that comes when you spend all your time wondering why—and not if—I am depressed and moody again. I was building my crookedly inappropriate citadel to hide behind even before I got there. And she had nothing to do with the walls, then.

            All I was shielding myself against was my need to fit the standard of pretty that I was never engineered to fit. To be beautiful like I was never meant to be. Petite and pretty, like her, was never a part of the plan the Universe had for me. Her ready laugh and all that you got along about…

            I killed myself and you.

            I killed us with my Hollywood reflexes and my angry vocabulary.

            I won’t apologise. I was happy to finally have met her, to have seen this most worthy queen of your life.

            But I was terrified of how much better she was than me, to me, in my eyes.