Romance of the Monodom

They are inseparable, such that it is impossible to define one without the other. Their existential interdependence is so pervasive as to have turned what were once two individual, self-contained entities into a single, apathetic two-headed monster of palpable misery.

She - with her endearing charms and guile, her relentless, futile pursuit of his affections,  does not know when to stop. Despite all her cunning and machinations: the love potions and black magic, astrological predictions and the advice she gets from a wide variety of sources ranging from anonymous message boards on the internet to her best friend's colleague to Oprah, she does not realize that for any design of hers to bear fruit, he must meet her half-way: The black magic cannot work if he dismisses it as hogwash, the astrology is immaterial if he is unwilling to let his actions be influenced by the relative positions of the stars across the sky, the love potions are ineffective if she puts it in his beer and he is unaware of how much more expensive his urine is. And all the counsel she has sought, going to great pains to not seem too desperate, making him out to be more receptive to her advances than he really is, has proven to be useless: the questionable usefulness of such advice diluted further by her pretended indifference to its need. Her prayers to manifold deities, for in desperation she is willing to turn to any source of strength, any possible recourse to let him return her love, have produced no miracles - for her atheistic charmer cannot be swayed by powers that have only an existence hinging on the belief people claim to place in them. He is a man of reason, and she has no rational argument to appeal to his intellect with, his brain does not accept things it cannot understand, and her obsession with him is beyond the ability of his logical processes strengthened by several orders of magnitude, she does not even quite understand it herself, but she does not need to either.

For all he knows, she does not exist, or if she does it is only as a mere nuisance: something akin to the mosquitoes he feeds in his sleep, or the electricity outages he whiles away by swatting them. She lays herself at his feet, an immovable object that like a kitten, becomes an object of affection out of sheer inevitability. But he only sees a viper coiling itself around his limbs, retarding his mobility, intruding on his freedoms, squeezing the life out of him. Her only response when he kicks her away is to cling harder. He has never heard a word of complaint issue forth from her lips, when she speaks she has only the most blatant flattery to spout. Her every action, conscious and otherwise, is geared towards his sustained comfort. His ingratitude does not even seem to slow her down. When she broke a leg after 'falling' from the balcony they were standing on, for she would never admit that he had pushed her off, she had followed him anyway. Crawling and limping, dragging the lifeless, broken limb behind her, trailing in the clouds of dust he blazed in his attempt to be rid of her - catching up to him when he paused for rest. Until the moment he finally stopped caring; she has no longer the prepossession to merit even a chance glance from his skyward-turned eyes, nor can he be bothered to swear and shake his fist at her. The hare has not any need to outrun the turtle. She is in the background: an insignificant deaf mute, that speaks and listens and feels - but cannot get herself to register on his noble, arrogant, savage mind.

They are, as I said, inseparable: he would not be recognized without the trailing husk of a living being that he keeps in thrall, she simply does not exist but as his shadow, or a speck of dust in the little cloud he kicks up with his graceless, heavy stride - willing the earth to split open under the sheer weight of the contempt he has for all things on the surface. They have been cursed with infinite patience, for neither seems to be in a hurry to break the cycle, and indeed it has gone on so long that it is no longer certain whether there is a cycle. They have been blessed with the weakness of mind that prevents humans from changing their minds,  gifted with the lethargy of spirit that keeps people shackled to the easy task of rationalizing the familiar. They were not created for a life of adventure, for the exhilaration of discovery or the admiration of generations to follow. They were created to be ignored in their lifetimes and forgotten after death.  They were created to love and be loved, and that is the fate they seem least willing to accept.