If You Were My Marionette

If you were my marionette, at what a great loss I’d be! To command your will with a pull of a string, would be to drain my own. For I can’t imagine how I could think better for you, than you think. A puppeteer may love his creation, but he knows that if she reach up to him with love, it would only be his love, his dream; it would not be her own. Her love would be a figment of his imagination, acted out with lifted machinations and choreographed motions of his own wrists, his own longings.

To know that your hands are free… when they lift to me, then I know I have a gift outside of myself. It is not my skill which makes you dance. It is not my will that makes you bounce, curtsy, and laugh. These are given by a living breast, a warm and beating heart. The eyes that look to me are not drawn by a thread, but by a magic beyond coercion. They are drawn to mine on their own, from a heart where I have been given a throne… not by force, not by right, but given freely and—to me—most carelessly.

There need be no curtain to hide this man’s relationship to his doll. Even a child sees the strings and knows what goes behind is directed by one. But I tower not above thee, nor do you, diminished, dance below me. But on one stage, with just enough height to rest your head upon my beating chest, we dance, two wills given freely, two dolls sharing one string. We care not who sees this string, for it is the one that circles us both and binds us – love… forever.