Cliche

Growing up, she always envisioned someone to come swooping down and save her from her misery. He (of course it's a he, she was child for goodness' sake) would be her knight in shining armour, he would be a dashing young man with a pearly white smile, have the darkest shade of black for hair, the brightest blue for eyes, and have moralities like a prince.

What she wanted was a person who understood her, who knew her like the back of his hand, whose eyes would drift to her amidst the large crowd almost automatically, who would choose her among the rest. As time went by and the odds of finding this particular person slimmed down to almost none, she was able to increase her expectations (something she didn't even know she was capable of).

By the time she was done with High School though, she was thoroughly convinced she was going to die alone in a house full of cats.

It bothered her, not enough to make her really stay awake at night but enough to make her falter during her everyday routine. Her friends were wonderful people, they stood by her through thick and thin and she can say with wholly conviction that she would do anything for them (sometimes, much to her horror and amusement, she finds herself even willing enough to hide a dead body for them...so to speak). Much to her chagrin though, her friends seem to find their perfect person-their other half­- with such ease that it makes her jealous (of course it wasn't really easy for them and the fact that she even thinks that it was easy fills her with self-loathing).

There will always be a person who will understand you but finding a person who will accept you for you, and whose smile would be as bright as the sun's when they set their eyes upon you...well, that's another thing entirely.

Life was so different from multitude of books she read. She still remembers sneaking around in a dark house, pulling books out of shelves and running back to her room afterwards, faltering only once to press her tiny ear against the door of her parents' room to make sure they weren't awake. She still remembers picking the flashlight up and, with her tiny hands, holding it up so she could read about how Rapunzel got her prince in the end, how the dashing Prince Phillip battled a dragon for Aurora, and finally, she remembers falling in love with the idea of a perfect prince.

When she grew up, she had convinced her parents to place a bookshelf-now filled with books-in her room. Every night, in the comforting silence, she would read, her emerald gaze flitting from one corner of the page to another, her eyes hungrily taking the text in. She never really grew out of adventures but now, reading about high school drama and cancer patients and breaking stereotypes and true love...

She knows, gosh she knows, that all of these things were unlikely. Even though she grew up reading about fairy tales and impossible things, there was always a voice inside her head that said-that's illogical, there is no such thing as dragons, mermaids nor is there such a thing as true love.

But there was another side that insisted that these things were real, that true love was real. It insisted that there was such a thing as fireworks and sparks during a kiss, that there truly was a happily ever after.

But as time went on, her views changed.

As she boarded the plane to England (because she blossomed into this nerd in High School who dreamed of going to a prestigious school in a foreign country) and looked back over her shoulder, she felt like she was not only looking back to her home but also her memories and beliefs. She felt like she was leaving them all behind, that she was finally ready to accept that it was time to leave the little girl with her raven black hair tied into pigtails and belief that there was someone out there for her.