Saved

As a child, I saw you dressed as Prince Charming, holding the glass slipper that I hoped would fit. You lost your sight while your mad wife burned the house down. Later you composed symphonies you could only hear in your head — I played your music, wrote you poems, and cried under a vague moon light.

You weren’t the boy I gifted my first kiss to, neither the blond rebel, nor the mathematician. You glanced at me through the eyes of the teachers I was falling in and out of love with, the impossible love that turned my heart to desert and left me thirsty, yearning for you.

One day, when I was lonely like God, I wrote in a poem how I imagined people first, then lived with them through history, believing all was real. Did I conjure you up too? Or was it time to meet my hero, the man who’d save me from myself?

I recognised you, Prince Charming, Mr Rochester, Beethoven. You didn’t say much, just trembled through the first dance and the quiet in me told me it was you.

When you offered me the glass slipper, I knew it would fit.

It did.