"Who was Cinderella's guy?"
"Prince Charming," the class said in unison.
"Who was Snow White's guy? Same guy, right?"
"But they look different!" a hopeful girl yelled from the back of the room.
"Yea... he changed clothes!"
I slumped in my chair and let the rain of disappointment fall over my head. If happy endings don't even exist in fairy tales then how can we possibly expect to find happiness in real life? Is it possible that our Prince Charming cheats? Does Cinderella file for divorce?
When it comes right down to it there are certain things we can't live without and then there are certain things that we just don't want to. I think every girl feels that making the transition from high school to college will enable some of these wants and desires to become realities, namely, freedom from parents, social liberties, and the dream that they will find the one person they will end up with forever. There's an unspoken notion within the female population that one should be able to find someone to love in a span of 4 years. When the dating pool turns into a dating ocean no one can help but think about the unlimited possibilities that reveal themselves. So what happens when we can't find the one thing we don't want to live without? The more important question... why can't we live without it?
I opened an e-mail from a friend that I had ignored for the past few days due to it's enormity. Her long-winding, frustrated, slightly incoherent voice popped into my head as I read her words. "I really like having a boy around. Not just having a boy around, but having a boy that I want around around." She continued on with more trials and tribulations of being a female, categorizing all of her faults in the recent weeks, and ended with a characteristic goodbye,
"Love you, miss you, sick, sleepy, slowly but surely failing, sometimes slutty, saturated-fat and sugar filled, Summer". I wanted desperately to write back with some 500 excerpts from The Feminine Mystique or present a tirade of examples that would prove her behavior was ridiculous but I was lost for words. The night before I had gotten in a fight with Danny and suddenly all of my feminine education, my moral constitution of boy-girl behavior, my well-founded feelings of no shit from men had flown out the window. I sat at my desk empathizing with her while textbooks rendered useless laid sprawled out in front of me. I felt like someone had poured water thought my ears and washed away my thoughts... except that one. That one thought stayed with me as I fell asleep, haunted my dreams, and woke with me again in the next morning. I willed it away and yet my control was limited; it's hold around my thoughts refused to let go as long as I was breathing and the longer I waited, the darker the bruise became on my heart.
It's like an image of movie love perfection had deluded my mind. A soft pink gown holding suffocatingly tight at the torso as the rest of the fabric flows underneath her and lifts her into a cloud of desire. She leans into him and steadies herself with a light palm against his chest. One finger lingers to the scruff on his neck and he looks at her and instinctively knows she is waiting to be kissed. She's so passive, so willing as she smiles up at him while he waits a few more moments to enjoy this. His lips brush her cheek and his hand curves around the back of her neck pillowing her nerves. The other hand controls his fingertips that press into the small of her back pushing her towards him. Finally, he leans in, his intentions deliberate and under control, and closes the crevice of light shining between their lips. In this moment her foot pops, her heel turns slightly upward, and she feels grateful, complete. Her foot hangs in the air as their lips remain together. It's more than lust, she thinks, it's everything.
It's amazing to see how willing some people are to give up their sense of freedom as single human beings for the perpetual roller-coaster of emotions that comes along with being in a relationship. Are we really that vain that we need a significant other to know that we are worth something? That it's that other person that completes us and not our own self? Whether or not we realize it, we are progressively poisoned by cultural expectations beginning in our adolescence. Instead of focusing on life day by day we look towards the end and thus, form anticipations about how our lives should be when in reality our lives shouldn't be any way, they just are. Unfortunately, the human mind is almost always incapable of finding a cure and we live our whole lives hoping that at the end we will have found happiness much like our well-known Cinderella. What's missing from the nostalgic picture books that leave us praying for an end much like its own, is the reality that we already have had happiness, will have happiness, and possibly have happiness right now. Maybe Cinderella doesn't end up with Prince Charming, but maybe Prince Charming has been in the story too long.
