Pen and Paper

“I wonder what she’ll make me do this time. I’m exhausted of her making me kiss you passionately. My lips are so worn out that next time we touch they will fall off.” 

“That is your biggest concern? Kissing? Do you have any idea how many times I have died for you? For your love? Well, more times than I can remember.” 

“Stop being such a griper.”  

  “A griper? Really? I have fought dragons and gotten my left arm reduced to ashes. I have been eaten by a giant ant, excreted into a nest of deadly acid-spitting cobras and saved by a panda bear while trying to save you.” 

“I know, I know. Maybe if you tried harder, we would not be in this situation and we would finally have our own castle and in it, living happily ever after.”

 “You must be kidding me! Every day we have to do everything we are not comfortable doing. Oh, and we also have to pretend to be fierce and in love. I mean, my name changes so often that I am having an identity crisis; Charles, Christopher, Chreon…”

 “Well, I see a pattern there” 

“Oh, and she makes me do things you would have never even think of”

 “What kind of things?”

 “Unspeakable things.” 

“So, she takes you to other... adventures without me?” 

“Oh boy, she does.” 

“What do you mean?”

 “Well, every so often she takes me to journeys where only princes go.” 

“What’s it like?” 

“Well, it is always a gargantuan far away castle sitting on the verge of a cliff overseeing a radiating lava-filled river. The scene always starts close to sundown and the birds are doing the last flight for the day before going back to their nests. On the horizon, this range of…” 

“Can you skip to the important part?”

 “Ugh, you are annoying… Well, once the sun sets, fireworks illuminate the sky marking the start of this insane carnival; dances, drinks, food and lots of Adonis-looking lads just being sexy. I do not want to go into details, but good prose those guys know how to party!” 

“You are disgusting!” 

“Well, as you may already be aware of my dear, I have no self-control, neither do you. Does not she take you anywhere else? Like, let’s say to play with other princesses?”

 “No! Though, Sometimes she makes me walk on this vast prairie filled with Dandelions. The flowers seem to move in perpetual unison powered by the warm wind preceding a summer rain. Then it gets colder and colder and I pick one of the flowers to pluck it petal by petal until I hear the thumping of tears on the pages and the scene blurs away. I hear her sobs until she falls asleep. She has been doing that more frequently.”

 “Now that I think about it, I have not seen my charming princes in a while”

 “Eww, Christopher”

 “Christopher? Quite funny, Olive, but you are probably right, call me whatever name you like, Dulcinea.” 

“Seriously, how do you think this is going to end?” 

“I have some Hypotheses about it. Look, we always go into character as soon as the pen touches the paper and she starts streaming her thoughts onto it. We are unable to re-live the stories any time we want, thus unable to go back. We do have all the memories, even though we cannot learn anything else on our own. Oh, and we can only remember so far back as to the first words of the story Once upon a time, a princess in trouble meets her savior; the most unlikely of men…”  

“What does that mean?” 

“That you and I may die when she gets to the last page and she stops writing.”

 “But what if she writes they lived happily ever after”

 “We may be happy for fraction of a moment while she imagines it, until she writes the final period, drops us in her drawer to remain forgotten forever after.” 

“I don’t want to end like that. I was born only…”

 “Several hundred pages ago?”

 “Is that so?”

 “I am unsure if there is a way to escape this realm. Everything repeats like in a recurring nightmare—that ballpoint pen coming down slowly upon us and the pounding of pouring prose and all the words edged on the paper and boom! I am fighting a giant hairy tarantula because you were clumsy enough to fall in its web.” 

“I thought we already agreed to the lack of control here”

 “I know, I know, I am just trying to cheer you up, you know” 

“What should we do then? Do you think we can re-write our own story? Perhaps, after she stops writing we are set free by her mind or we go back to her. There must be a way out of these pages, she put us here she can take us back.”

 “We are a creation of her mind, wicked or innocent. How do you know if this is something she is making up? What we are doing right now. Self-awareness? We believe we can think independently. This could probably be another one of her games. 

“There must be a way out.”

“You know the worst part about this? We could be versions of people she had written about in the past. Parts of us are also stuck in other notebooks, perhaps we have already died hundreds of times in hundreds of different notebooks, pieces of paper, napkins the palm of her left hand a picnic table on the side of a road” 

“You are saying that we could actually die at any time and our story could be inconclusive, not even a happily ever after?”

 “Don’t worry. You know what? I am sure this is our first book together and we will still be alive on the next one she writes, the sequel perhaps. It is possible that since we are a creation of her mind we can be summoned out of her head into other pages at will. I do wonder how many pages left we have”  

The end