And She Lived.. Happily Ever After

“In a land, far far away lived a princess with long silky hair and beautiful gleaming eyes, dreaming that one fine day the man of her dreams will come and woo her off her feet, sway.”

She recalled this line that was printed in her head since childhood, thanks to the numerous fairy tales she had slept hearing to as a child. As a girl who has learnt to do everything by herself, a line like that should not make much of a sense. Right?

From the fairy tales as she moved on to a not so fairy tale life, she realized how much she had been torturing herself by bearing the burden of these words. She was beaten, abused, verbally and physically. Yet she stood strong because she remembered the lines from the grandmother’s story she had heard as a little girl. “When a girl marries, she goes as a bride to the new house and comes out only when she dies.” Nothing made sense but her senses had ceased to function long back. Was it time for her to wipe these tales off her soul and listen to some new ones?

Looking at her one would often question how an educated, working young woman could be beaten black & blue, all her money taken away, and still love her husband so much? How was she bearing the torture, the horrendous crimes done upon her? Every time something inside her made her fight back, but the stories kept on coming back and logic kept on going away.

The charm of stories is that the moral and the ending are at times all we remember. She still had that torn out book from her childhood. She would often go back to it, re-read and pacify her soul, that this was a phase and would be over, and that a happily ever after would happen soon. How soon, was the biggest question?

Gleaming eyes turned into teary blue ones. Long silky hair became worn out ropes dragging her across the floor. The land far away was the land of living hell on earth. And her prince was not the prince, but the villain of the story. Could she have a happily ever after?

The story of her life originated from a story she had heard to live a happy life. But she soon became a story I tell for others to live happily ever after. We hear a lot of stories in our lives. We decide what we take out of them. For her, the fairy tale happy ending was all she wanted. She left the land hopeless and torn, may be to a land far far away.

For me, her story changed the way I looked at a fairy tale. Everyone’s life isn’t the same. And as I remember this story of hers, I have in mind hundred and thousand more to learn from. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, but sometimes we forget the whole purpose of life.

“The journey is more important than the ending.”