What is winning?
We go through life looking for purpose, doing as others tell us to find our place in the world, to create ourselves and find happiness. We search for the white dove, constantly day to day. The king sitting on the thrown telling you how to live your life, what to do with your days, what to do with your time here, and that your life could be taken at any second. Every day is a match against ourselves to win at the game of life.
Every dove that Hugh had gathered was the same, gray-blue and meaty. All of us are like this too, all as one blurred color, each trying to be the center, the meat of the flock. The white dove is what we strive to be. The queen actually becoming something different, something new, but in the end still just one out of 100. Nothing too good seems right. In ancient times, people would expect something bad to happen to them after good had, just to even out our lives as we try to live in balance. Balance of 100 doves, which sound so even so perfect when actually the king most likely didn’t even need the 99 already.
A wedding is supposed to signify a new beginning of two lives coming together, not death. At the wedding, there was supposed to be 100 doves, starting a new story for the king and queen to live of simplicity and peace. No real life is lived like this, unless you don’t live at all although we are still in search of this. Love as well as life shouldn’t be forced, to be happy. The dove says,
"Master fowler, free this dove,
The queen will be your own true love."
When someone resorts to their happiness to suffice a "need" of someone else, there is nothing real left, and death of some type occurs. The death of the dove, in a way seemed to bring pleasure to Hugh though, knowing that she will never be the Kings. When people are jealous, they are unrealistic about life. We don’t realize what we have, that we have the 99 other doves already, and should be thankful we were called upon first to be the fowler for the Kings wedding. The 99 other doves, is like our lives, always incomplete however it is looked at. You can never catch the 100th dove.
In the end the 100th dove, is just a dove, but you still remember her. She is still dead, like the 99 others, but she spoke up and actually said something. She escaped each net that caught her, possibly as escaping each net of lies that are entwined into our everyday lives. Once the lies are too big though, having a tight grip around you, they squeeze until they get a response, not always what they expected to hear and it surprises them. This time they didn’t win, and they crack, not knowing what to do, and crack your neck in half. In the end no one wins. Everything is dead. The love that the king and queen had is dead, the white dove or queen lives no more, and the fowler lives alone in dedication to the world.
Every moment we live, is lived as there will be a next no matter what. The queen was once living, and the next she was not, this can be anybody, and we each affect each other. We choose our actions, but our actions create reactions and life and death. The king had called Hugh in to be the fowler for his wedding, as he is called in he sees the queen, and now wants her. He knows where he belongs at the beginning, but as she is reinforced in his life, he forgets where he stands. We are loyal to each other to some extent, but sometimes things are forgotten. We can’t take a reaction back, and sometimes it will stay with us for the rest of our lives. Hugh wears the golden ring of the white dove on a necklace, now a chain holding him down around his neck. The “servo” motto on his heart is now replaced by a ring that was never his, that he had never had, but now both his loyalty and his dreams are gone, although he still won. The queen and king didn’t marry, and he got the 100 birds to the king by the day of the wedding, so he had finally “won.”
