Forever After (Elizabeth)

Tomorrow is never coming.
Our lives are never ending and
The world is always turning.
The sun is always setting and
The night is never ending
Your car is ever shrinking and
The silence just keeps going.
Our hands are always meeting and
Your car is ever running
Our knees just keep on brushing and
Our feet are disappearing
This song is everlasting but
Our love is a train wreck-always crashing.

Your words are just like arrows-
Ever piercing, ever scarring
My heart is like a target-
Always painted, never winning
We fit together like a broken glass-
Always glued, never sticking
My tears are like the beat
Always hurting, always falling.

I don’t know why we do this
Know I’ll never understand
Why I ripped my beating heart out
And I placed it in your hand
And as you slowly squeezed it harder-
Harder, until it popped
I swear I never really thought it hurt-
Never felt the pain-
Until you stopped.













Once upon a time…
I was supposed to live happily ever after. I met my Prince, fell in Love at First Sight, and my hair was perfect. So what went wrong? Right from the Once Upon a Time I knew it was meant to be. I knew that it was perfect-we were perfect.
So where’s my Happily Ever After?

Dead. On a road. In the Middle-of-Nowhere, Ohio. Bloodied and flattened.

Roadkill.

That’s where my freaking Happy Ending is. It got hit by a car a decade ago. I never had a shot at saving it-it was out of my hands before I even knew it was in them. It’s no one’s fault. But, God, do I wish I had someone to blame.



Elizabeth was full of hope. She knew it was silly, knew that hope only lets you down harder, but she was hopeful, nonetheless. The convention was going well. It was a little dull, but then that was practically a tradition. While English teachers all think that they themselves are very interesting people, they rarely think their colleagues are anything remarkable. And all good English teachers can give a stirring lecture about the importance of correct grammar, spelling and MLA format, no one really wants to listen to such lectures.
Despite a permeating mood of resignation to mediocrity and slight boredom, Elizabeth remained optimistic. Of course, her optimism didn’t spring from nowhere, though. She had met someone. A tall, handsome, funny, modest, charming, too-good-to-be-true someone. A someone who, from first sight (as silly as it sounds) she thought she could be with forever. A someone she thought she could Love. If she didn’t already.
Miraculously, Alaric (for that was the someone’s name, Alaric) seemed to think she, boring Elizabeth Cunningham, High School English teacher, was someone, too. And even though they had only known each other for six days, it felt like it had been forever.
As always, Elizabeth was (painfully) aware of the chance that he would realize that they really weren’t good for each other-that he would suddenly come to his senses, give her a strange look, and walk away.

It had happened before.

But still, she remained-obnoxiously, even to herself- hopeful. As she put on the dress she had bought (rather foolishly, it wasn’t really something she could afford) just for tonight, carefully applied her make-up and arranged her hair, her heart was swollen with all of the hoping and singing that was going on. She sang “Wonderful Tonight” to herself, and felt foolish, but couldn’t get the hopeful smile off of her face.
Honesty wasn’t something she found often. Her high school students were rarely honest, which was understandable, they looked out for themselves first and foremost, so lying came naturally. Her parents, while essentially good people, had been together for all the wrong reasons, had lied to themselves and each other when they got married, and kept lying when they found out about Elizabeth, lying that she was a good thing, that she could strengthen a marriage made of lies and held together by frayed nerves. They divorced early in her childhood. Her mother had never really wanted kids, Elizabeth was just another lie she had told her husband, and when they got their divorce she didn’t even pretend to fight for custody. So Elizabeth grew up with her father, a good-natured man who would rather spend time with his plants than with people. Her mother sent her money on her birthdays until she turned 18, but was only a shadowy memory punctuated but the sharp stops of high-heels on slightly creaky wood floors and the smell of expensive perfume-impressions so alien to her father’s quiet nursery that Elizabeth knew there was no one but her mother who could have made them.
In Alaric she had found honesty. He had told her about the tragedy of his young-adulthood- losing his twin sister to a drunk driver and the emotional scars left behind right from the start. She knew that because of this event, so hard for anyone to handle, let alone a seventeen-year-old boy made it hard for him to put himself out there, made it hard for him to love. He had a shy, hesitant smile that seemed to come right from his soul, and his blue eyes sparkled when he saw the humor in something. He had told her that he was an English teacher from a small town in Ohio, not so very far from where she had grown up, and that he, like her, had grown up to realize that the small town living that had once strangled him now embraced him, that there were worse things than never leaving home. To her it seemed that he was the most genuine person she had ever met, that compared to Alaric everyone else might as well have been wearing masks and costumes and speaking from a script. His mix of sincerity and a strange, strong vulnerability was shattering.
Elizabeth floated down the stairs to dinner. For the second-to-last night of the convention they were holding a formal dinner with dancing, a tradition Elizabeth had never appreciated until this year, this moment. On the schedule it was always marked as a “ball.” When she received the schedule in the mail originally, back in her quiet little town, Elizabeth had laughed at the use of the antiquated term like she did every year prior. But here, now, it seemed perfect. She felt like Cinderella-so why shouldn’t she be attending a ball?
She alighted at the bottom of the stairs and there he was, her Prince Charming. He smiled in relief when he saw her, and came to meet her.