Fairy Heads and Tales

The storybooks lied to me. Life doesn't turn out the way they said it would, because there isn't really a happily  ever after.

Little Red got eaten by the wolf on the road to her grandmother's house and most certainly was not saved by a daring woodcutter who just happened to be strolling by with an ax. The fairy tales didn't tell you that after 'happily ever after' happened, Phillip died and left Aurora all alone. In reality, Cinderella never even made it to the ball because her fairy godmother was just a figment of her imagination and there was no pumpkin carriage or magical transformation into a beautiful ball gown. Snow White died before the story began because the huntsman followed orders and killed her in the forest. 

And really, Ariel never even existed because mermaids aren't real. Period. 

Hansel and Gretel got eaten by the witch, Rapunzel never left her tower, Aladdin died in the Cave of Wonders, and Peter Pan grew up. Jack didn't bargain for any magic beans, he traded the cow for something that could keep him alive because that's what normal people do. Nancy Drew never made it out of her third case alive, and in real life, Lizzie Bennett never got married because she was too outspoken for a woman of her time.

When I was a little girl, I thought that life was a fairy tale. When I was in elementary school I thought that divorce was only something that happened when a spouse cheated. When I was in junior high, I thought that I would find true love and I'd know it as soon as I found it. Now I'm in high school, and I've learned the hard way that none of that is true. Life isn't a fairy tale, divorces happen for every imaginable reason, and I don't really know what true love is. In the fairy tales there's a good guy and a bad guy. Not in life. In life the lines have been blurred so that I don't know the difference between good and evil. I just know that if you're not the winner you're the loser.

No, in real life there's not really a happily ever after. There's just a series of 'once upon a times,' each with their own dragons to fight, and sometimes it just doesn't turn out the way we expected. 
Because when people stop treating each other like princes and princesses, they realize that their heads were filled with too much magic for real love. They realize they don't want to spend the rest of the story together and most definitely not happily ever after. So they go their separate ways to fight the dragon or rescue the damsel and they forget to tell the readers what really happened. 

They don't live happily ever after, because there is no such thing. 
Not anymore.