The Why of Endings | QLRS Vol. 16 No. 3 Jul 2017

There's this story of a soldier and a princess. Or a czar's dream girl
daughter, or your grandmother, in the time you could not remember
when she was heartbreaking. Or someone else, in the end, isn't it the same:
the soldier meets the princess and falls in love. The princess tells him:
if you wait outside my window for a hundred days and nights I will love you. You may
imagine her looking meekly away from him as she says this, and you may imagine
a pair of hearts clenching and swelling. The story goes that the soldier did as he
was told.
There's nothing in the middle of the story, merely a prolonging of what I mean to say.

Nearing the end, our soldier weeps nightly, or whenever we remember
to look, we remember him weeping. The soldier shall become our statue,
our landmark,
and we are going to name things after him. He will stand for tragic enduring love,
one-sided, obvious; we will think heartbreaking and silence and hero. The princess
behind the window is going to become a monster to scare future children with.
The story ends when the soldier turns and leaves. Our hero disappears into,
you may imagine, a dark center of the fairy tale wood. This has to be the ending.
And that when someone tells someone a love story, it is our story;
no one else will bother to tell you the violence of a fairy tale.