Le prince du monde (The Prince of the World)

I was waiting pour mon Prince Charmant

“Who is he?” you ask. Well, the one who charms you the most, obviously. What does it mean to charm someone? To have them under a spell. A spell of good looks, humour, wonderful words, whatever the sort may be.

It’s my fault for believing he’d show up. Life is no fairytale. It’s my fault for watching all those Disney princess movies. Life is no fairytale. It’s my fault for believing in happily ever after’s. Life is no fairytale.

 

I relate the most to Belle, in terms of Disney princesses, I mean. Her name means Beauty in French. She read all the day long. And loved her father very dearly. She didn’t intend to be charmed or fall in love with the Beast. It just happened. We saw how fed up she was with her small town and wouldn’t even give the Charmer of the Town, Gaston, the time of day. The whole town marvelled at her yet made her feel like an outcast because she was a mystery to them.

She was headstrong, well-read and beautiful. Does that sound like anyone you know?

 

On the contrary, I always found Cinderella rather annoying. I’ll have to watch the movie again and get back to why because I don’t have a real reason for disliking the movie so much. Press pause.

Never mind, I don’t have to finish the movie to find out why I dislike it. (I only got through the credits.) It’s the same reason I’m writing this today. My Prince Charming never came.

 

Now for Christians, we say we have already been saved by our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. And, to a certain extent I can say that he is my Prince Charming, he who rescued me from the depths of my despair. However, can I argue that there are some holes, some voids, some depths Christ cannot fill? I can already hear the cries of blasphemy from the churchgoers, forgive me Lord.

But no honestly. The other day I was with my friend, and we discovered a song called “Drop It Low (For Jesus).” I had to take a step back and ask myself “Is this real?” Take a listen to the song and you tell me what you think!

Jesus cannot replace the space of a husband to the point where you’re “dropping it low” for The Most High. I am trying to get this out without sounding like a heathen.

When you want to hug someone, you cannot hug The Father nor The Son who is above in heaven and you cannot hug The Holy Spirit. Instead, God places people in your life whom you can choose to hug.

So, I was looking to be rescued and my rescuer never came. I put so much faith in fantasy. I was warned to stray away from watching all the children’s movies in my adulthood and stay in reality. But I couldn’t. I literally could not help myself. I needed to know there was going to be a happy ending.

Why did I need to be rescued anyways? I had a roof over my head, water to drink and bathe in, food to eat. I had all The Bare Necessities (Disney reference) and more than most. What was causing me to be so unhappy with my circumstances that I wanted so direly to be the damsel in distress rescued from a train track, when I was indeed already in a lofty castle?

I still don’t know.

 

They say living too far in the future leads to anxiety and living too deep in the past leads to depression. I don’t  know if any of that is true or scientifically backed up. All I know is that I had been vehemently upset with my circumstances for a while, two years at least. What brought me out was gratitude. Now, “they” (cause who’s they?) say gratitude and anxiety cannot occur at the same time. Once again, I don’t know if that has any truth to it but once I looked around at what I had, who I was and who I had around me, things became a little easier. Like a turtle, I peeked my head out of the shell I had closed myself in on, just to see if it was okay for me to lift my head a little bit above the water.

I guess you call it living in the moment, being mindful and all that. Something I had literally never learned to do, or at least forgotten along the way. 

As a child the movies were just movies. Winnie the Pooh was just a show I watched. A fairytale was just that: a tale. A story. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being fun. I stopped having fun. 

So what I did, is I tried to make the fairytale happen. I tried to bring the movie, the tall tale, the false reality to life. I could’ve enjoyed the children’s movies as a child because they were made for me. For me to live as a grownup and try to emulate what I see in movies for kids is hopeful living, but in my experience, I’ve found it’s also foolish living.

I don’t have an analogy or a story I can relate this to in order to properly understand it.

Oh wait, yes I do!

 

Imagine going to masquerade ball and meeting a masked man, falling in love, the both of you, then you have to leave and as you scurry along, you accidentally forget your shoe at the ball. He goes about the town (with your shoe in hand) hoping that he’ll find you. (First of all, he’s a madman. Do you know how many women wear the same shoe size?) 

But here’s your mistake: you remain waiting in hope. Stalled. He could’ve forgotten about you or never found the shoe. There’s no use in waiting to escape your everyday hell when there’s no surety that you’ll be rescued.

And I think at this point, I’m just angry that Cinderella’s Prince Charming found her, and I’ve given up on waiting for a Repulsive Nobody to find me. (Side secret: I looked up the antonyms of prince and charming.)

 

How’d this all start again? Oh, the basic facts of life. (That I've been running away from.) Life is no fairytale.

 

Thankfully, the spell has been broken and I will live happily ever after…

 

P.S. This was supposed to be a berating of Le prince du monde (The Prince of the World), the man who is for anybody BUT me and instead turned into a berating of myself. So lovely we’re all here to witness this.