Dear Paris,
I had forgotten you died. I always saw you as living beyond them, joining the city of mourners, knowing but never understanding that your love, who died — as you thought — on the morning you were to marry her, was never yours at all. That underneath your measured courtship, your civil gallantry, two wild flames ignited, flared high, and snuffed out. You would have lived to an honorable old age and never understood it any better. You loved her with all the fervency you had; your heart was broken when she died. In your mind, forever, the names are “Paris and Juliet,” and though the rest of the world speaks of a different story, it could never sink in for you.
And I suppose that is why you died. You thought you were the gallant lover, fighting to defend your beloved’s grave, and you could not possibly have seen that your enemy was fighting not to desecrate it, but to die on it. You would never have died for love; only children and fools do that. Romeo was a child and a fool, and if you had lived past that day you would have always been faintly bewildered that both the lady and the glory went to him. You deserved far better. But deserving matters little enough in the rest of life, and hardly at all in love.
You should have lived. Your own story’s logical conclusion was a loving wife, a few handsome children, the respect of your fellow citizens. You would not have forgotten her, but you would have mourned and moved on. The strange conclusion of your first love would have given a prick of humility, always, to the way you saw yourself. I like to think it would have sharpened your sense of humor, taught you to hold lightly your assumptions about the world and your place in it. Their story would have faded into the foundations of your character, something that happened to you when you were young. Instead it is you who have faded, just one of a ring of stones surrounding their great pyre. Yours would have been a better life, but theirs was the better story.
To the county Paris, noble and patient, gallant and kind, loving far too calmly and too wisely for the story he found himself in: te saluto.
2 Comments
Oh man. The play was depressing enough before you made me empathize with this guy.
Maturity doen’t make for good poetry. At least not in Shakespeare’s world. I imagine that’s why folks don’t usually pay attention to Paris.
Heh, sorry. Yeah. Maturity pretty much never makes for good poetry. Occasionally you can write a good novel about mature people (Middlemarch being my favorite example), but never poetry.
Seeing the play definitely came pat to the psychological moment for me this time around, and birthed this empathy for Paris. I expect it’s evident that I identify much more closely with him than with the star-crossed teenagers. And I’ve more or less made peace with the fact that my life will never form the center of a stage tragedy.