It began, and ended with, a simple story. I was nineteen years old, and a fool to fall in love, but then, we all were. The half-masticated remains of our high-school battered hearts yearned for something deeper than second base on prom night. I watched in amazement as the girls I once knew slipped lazily into the silky deceit of what they believed to be true love, wearing its lies like a pretty negligee. I followed them blindly, led by the smooth, deep voice of a man called James.
“Once upon a time,” he began, and I saw his eyes smile brightly, across four states, and through the web-camera we had been using to stay in contact with one another. The tears streaming down the left side of my nose made soft plicking sounds as they hit my keyboard. I heard my roommate roll over, coughing, but I did not care. I held onto his worlds, the night, and this magic like a thread I could not see, allowing it to lead me wherever he wanted me to go.
“We’re going to be so happy together,” he explained, his voice cracking slightly, his lips barely moving, his teeth shaking hard. “Honestly sweetheart, I think about marrying you when I’m lying awake, looking at the glow in the dark stars on my ceiling. I think about the love we’re going to have, and how someday you’re going to be such a wonderful mother, such a lovely wife.” I listened to him speak, and I pretended that I was not two thousand miles away, shivering in the moonlight of a tile-floored dorm during my first semester of college, frightened of the distance between us. I imagine that it is the year nineteen forty-four, and that it is perfectly acceptable to marry your first love. It is expected that you will write letters to your beau as he fights battles in unknown places very far away, and life is absolutely splendid when he finally returns home to the charming young lady with long, white gloves who has been waiting for him all this time. I allow James to tell me that we will live happily ever after, and I fade into a calming sleep, filled to bursting with his stars.
That is why, half a lifetime, and several thousand dreams, plans, and hopes later, I stand shielding my eyes from the afternoon sun, ruining the front of my polka dot dress with my fat, sloppy tears, trying to make sense of why he is leaving.
“Please,” I choke, “Don’t go.” How many times have I said these pitiful words, these pathetic, last syllables, to which I know the reply?
“Once upon a time,” he begins, but his face is the controlled, barren side of the Berlin Wall. Ach du. “There was a beautiful princess, and a handsome prince named James. James fell in love with the princess, who although quite lovely, was badly broken. He loved her so much that he wanted nothing more than to put her back together again. Little by little, he helped her heart heal, placing pieces of his own heart into hers. One day, James did not love her any more. He wanted his pieces back, but they were a part of her, and she held on to them.”
“You can have them back,” I whisper. “But promise me that you wont leave me. Promise me that all the plans we made will still come true.”
He drives away, my bare feet burning on the asphalt, trying to keep up with his car as it fades into the distance. I had been a foolish girl, becoming drunk off the false photographs of the future he had planted in my mind. James was a fairytale himself, a broken promise, a misleading story with a surprise ending. He was not the Prince Charming I had assumed him to be, but simply the actor who had memorized Charming’s dialogue, mannerisms, and lifestyle with astounding accuracy.
Darling, I truly believed that you were a man made of flesh and blood and bone, but you, my love, were nothing more than a fascinating story written with fading ink on yellowing paper.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
