There once was a man who couldn't love himself, and this man thought himself great enough to deserve a princess. Such was his narcissism that he both hated himself and loved himself. So this man, seeking a princess, went about his way until one day he found a woman suitable to his desires; she was very pretty, so pretty he thought "I don't deserve her, but I will try for her, because I love this woman that I do not know."
The trouble with the woman that he loved was she was only a painting, a painting of a woman a million miles away, far from the knight's court where this man found himself as he was. And so this man thought to himself, "I must go and find her; I must go take what is so rightfully mine, so rightfully not mine." Then he asked the king and the king spoke to his knight thusly:
"You shall not have her. She is a million miles away. Over a thousand years of travel it will take you. She is locked up in a mountain far to the north, in a frozen wasteland, never to be seen again. She is cursed. She will not love you back."
And thus said the man to his king:
"I am no longer your knight, for I am in love."
And he headed north. The king was right. Many days, many nights, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of nights and days passed, the man hardly seeing food nor sleep for the love of this woman that he had not met, that he only had his projections to work with. And thus the man, after many nights and many days, found himself at the base of a mountain, weak and exhausted. He climbed. He climbed desperately like a man seeking food for his soul. And thus he found the woman, locked away, having not seen another person for quite some time. And the man thought to himself, "Oh. How I do love this woman, and I hope that she loves me." This man took her by the hand; she smiled; he smiled back. And they made a home together in that mountain and lived happily ever after.
No wait, no. Fuck happily ever after; there's no such thing. This man doesn't deserve a beautiful wife; he didn't work for it. Sure, he crossed a desert but it doesn't justify happiness. You don't get happiness by sheer force of will or strength of compulsion. It's absolute bullshit. You don't get to get those things just because you're a madman. You don't get happiness, and there's no princess, and there's no valleys and deserts and mountains; there's only life; there's only weird, nonsensical paths that we run up and down not knowing where to go. And we have no idea. We have no idea where we're going or who we're going to. And happiness isn't some bottle you find floating down the river with a message in it to tell you to go somewhere, to do something. It's not advice that you take; it's a place that you live in your head. And it's an impossible place to find if you hate and love yourself. So there is no happy ending; there's only a pathless wood, full of birches.
