One day a beautiful girl stumbles into your castle. She’s for sure the answer to all your problems—the only slight potential issue is, she hates you.

What do you do?

Well you do like any respectable beast and roll out the red carpet and pretend to be someone you’re not. Pretend to be dashing and debonair (which you’re not). Pretend to be winsome and magnanimous. 

Or you drive straight at it (or her—drive straight at her) and lock her up in your castle and force her to fix all your life problems. Which will never work, especially since your life problems really boil down to one problem, which is your beastliness.

Because the only cure for your beastliness is love, and that is the one thing you can’t create, force, or manipulate. 

But, you can earn it. 

So onward you go, learning to eat, to dance, to sing, to laugh, to read and speak in poetic sentences that make you more appealing. 

But she doesn’t really bite. For all your charms, nothing seems to overcome the powerful odor of your thick fur, matted with animal sweat. No amount of dancing overcomes the absolute insanity of trying to hold her hand with your hoof. What are you supposed to do, pinch her hand? Stick your hoof in her hand?

But you know something she doesn’t. 

You know there is a curse, and a cure.

So how do you get her to love you, when you are utterly and completely unlovable?

How does a human become lovable? 

Foot, how does anything become lovable? 

How does a dress become a fad? How does a simple bracelet become a little girl’s most treasured possession? 

Meanwhile, as you are lost in your beastly thoughts, the girl sacrifices herself to save her Dad, then she saves your life from the man who wants to kill you.

Why does he want to kill you? 

Because the girl loves you and he can see it, and her love is what binds you too together. You, the beast, want her love, while he, the man, forces her to give it.

Who is the beast now?

But back to the main point: how come she loves you? Was it the red carpet? The dancing? The singing? (Surely the singing!) No, she loves you because she sees good in you.

But that good in you only started coming out when she came around.

Any beast can see she makes you a better beast.

She, through the raw power of her presence, makes you better.

So how does an unlovable beast become lovable? 

Well, it may be a simple answer, and you may dismiss it as a beastly daydream, but the thing that makes something lovable is its encounter with the sheer power of beauty.

“Beauty will save the world.” ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Read this on the VDT.