'Til Death We'll Be Freezing

Prelude

❄️Song to listen to while reading❄️: "Can't Catch Me Now" -Olivia Rodrigo
•
•
There once was a legend of a girl who had suffered great heartbreak. 

She was arranged to marry a man. He was much older than the girl and had a great wealth. For a poor family like her's, it could give them money they needed for a temporary time.

Her family was thrilled for the day she married him but she was devastated.
She despised him. The man was older with always too stiff clothes and a scratchy gray beard on his chin. He could provide a better life for her, but he wasn't the one she loved.

The girl was in love with another. A shorter and younger fellow– someone her family would never approve of.

He was her true love and they were a match made in Heaven. Together, they secretly made plans to run away and marry each other so they could be together forever.

On the Christmas morning she was meant to be married to the other man, the girl got up and packed everything she would need for her new life. It hurt her to go, leaving her younger siblings behind. One day, they would go through similar betrothals, just as she had. A meaningless thing– a thing meant only for the money her family could get from the arrangement.

She slipped out of her home under the cover of dusk to her and her lover's meeting place. She waited... and waited... yet, he hadn't arrived.

Their time for leaving was running short and once the time ran out, there wouldn't be another chance, so she decided to go. Surely he would be at the ship waiting for her with open arms. Yet, she felt a heartbreak deep within herself.

Heartbroken he didn't show.

Heartbroken because she thought he loved her.

She got on the ship and desperately searched for him, holding onto a tiny strand of hope that he would be there waiting for her. Yet, she found nothing.

She was crushed, yet she didn't let her heartbreak show.

The ship set off on the long journey and she tried to settle in for the couple of months she would be there. Every day, she looked among the groups of the crew to see if maybe, just maybe, she had missed him and he did, in fact, make it on the ship.

Every day, she found nothing.

One day, the ship came upon a terrible storm.
It raged on day and night with no sign of stopping. Water would spill onto the sides of the deck in waves of cold.

This went on for days until one day, a wave finally capsized the small ship, taking it under the water and crushing it.

The girl tried to hold on to the wood from the broken ship as she gasped for air, but another wave took her back under.

Legend has it, the last thing she thought of as the icy cold water took her under was her lover and how she would never see him again.

Some say, she washed up on a shore somewhere in colonial America as a winter spirit, bringing winter to the land year in and year out.

She is said to bring joy to the children with her icy cold winters and snow as she searches for her long lost lover in the unfamiliar land.

But, of course, that's just a fairy-tale.