Every morning Alison Mae Wright made the same wish. A wish that always lifted her heart and put a smile on her face but she had learnt long ago that wishes did not come true. She had already come to accept that wishes were just a hope, a moments thought for a better life. If Ally wanted her life to be better she would be the one to change it. Although, despite what she told herself, she always made the same wish in the hope that someday things would be different. She wanted more from life, a lot more, however she wasn't sure what of. She felt as if there was a gaping hole in her life that needed to be filled. With excitement, adventure, anything. Her life could be so much more and she was getting tired of waiting for it to begin.
Thats not to say her life was bad. She couldn't really complain. Well, not much anyway. She had a wonderful family, a loving boyfriend and a job. Sure, her job sucked like hell but at least she had one. Working in a cafe was never on her agenda, nobody wanted to work in a cafe but it still happened. When she was little she had big dreams, mainly to be a princess, but by the time she hit her seventh birthday she had wanted to be a princess photographer, not caring that it wasn't even a real thing. With that she believed she could travel the world, go wherever she wished but, by being a princess too, she would be treated like royalty. This, to her, was a perfect ambition and she had even decided that if she got to pick the princess she would be Princess Ariel, after all mermaids rocked! By the time she hit her tenth birthday, however, she had learnt that mermaids didn't actually exist so she would have settled for Cinderella or someone equally as glamourous. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, whenever she put on her work apron she felt less like Princess Cinderella and more like the maid. She would even go so far as to say that most of her customers were more evil then the Ugly Step Sisters and the Wicked Step-mother.
She had always planned to be a photographer. She and her best friend, Sarah, had both moved from their small coastal town to London to pursue their dreams. They attended university open days and been to specialist job centres. She even had a two month placement on a local newspaper but her dream just seemed to slip away. She couldn't put her finger on why or even when it happened. She just woke up one morning working in a cafe with no hope to pursue her career. She could blame it on the one too many drunken nights she and Sarah shared. For two small town girls to move to the big city was a huge shock to their systems. To go from a town with two local pubs to living in a city that never sleeps, with a club on every corner, was definitely a distraction. She would openly admit that they had lost their heads a little in the excitement. They had put living like typical drunken youths before thinking of their futures, something they both regretted now. Her regrets were deeper than Sarah's. For one, Sarah was never too sure what she wanted to do with her life and felt she hadn't really missed out. Secondly, she lived off her parents money. Something Ally didn't have the luxury of doing. She loved Sarah but at times, especially after another twelve hour shift, she became envious on how easy her friend had it.
Recently she had been thinking about going back to school and getting her qualifications. She'd saved enough money working in coffee hell to put herself through school and she could always pick up the odd shift for extra support. She wasn't worried and believed that she could do it but she would first have to talk to Arthur. She may just be the maid but she had found her Prince Charming. He was everything a girl could want in a man, funny, fascinating and insanely good looking and they had been living happily ever after for three years now. Well, for the majority of the time anyway.
They had met at the yearly carnival. She and Sarah had decided to go for the first time and spent the night wasting all of their money on stupid carnival games and stuffing their faces with cotton candy. It was getting late and despite the music blaring, they were both getting tired. It didn't help matters that they had had one too many ciders and as a result were both quite tipsy. She would never have met Arthur if they hadn't passed the unicorn stand. She had shrieked in a drunken delight — she had always loved unicorns. She had to have one of those fluffy teddies in her life.
