You came  not as a free agent but out of a sense of duty and loyalty. When you first came I was a beast, a beast perhaps with good intentions, a beast nevertheless. You were bright eyed and happy despite the bad hand fortune had dealt you. You delighted in the flowers in my garden. You stroked my fur you played hide and seek with me in that vast and mysterious garden with its melancholy smell of lilac.

I gave you jewels with a free hand. You accepted them with your sweet smile and said you would keep them for your sisters who, you said, placed great value on such baubles. You wove wreaths of blue corn flowers and placed them in your golden hair and when we rested in the shades of our alcove of roses you recited the verses of Omar the tent maker

When the time came for you to visit your own world I cried and begged you to return to me. You promised and you returned at the apointed hour and when, upon your return, you found me near death you bestowed a kiss on my forehead. Was I deceived? or was there passion in that kiss?? Your kiss turned a beast into a prince, a prince with good and kind intentions, perhaps, but a beast nevertheless in the innermost recesses of its being. Still, you were faithful, you bore my children and served me with grace..

You accepted me as your princely beast. You did not ask about my existence before we met in that garden , you did not ask what had made me a beast or a prince. You accepted magic as reality and reality as destiny.

Alas, you came to me as a woman fully formed and with a past that, I suspected, had many a dark side. You left me with the burning desire to have known you before we met; The child, the school girl, your lovers, your hopes, your dreams. For we all have dreams for our future when we are young and when life is before us. But you never spoke of those things to me and your only response to such questions was an enigmatic smile. And so I will never know how close your life in my castle came to the life of your dreams and expectations. In our embraces I wished for time to stand still, I wished there had been no past to know and that the future would never come. I sought to read your mind in the depth of your eyes but your eyes remained stubbornly shut and scenes you may have recalled in those short moments of eternity were never revealed. That painful mystery assured the perpetual renewal of my fascination and the constancy of my love.