01

Rapunzel was my favorite fairy tale in childhood.

Part of my stupid innocence believed that there was nothing more beautiful than waiting for years until true love was able to find me.

On the long-awaited day, I would certainly be combing my hair in front of a mirror adorned with ivory, and when my prince reached me in the highest tower of a forgotten castle, his golden hair would shine with the purest gold color. He would save me from that incessant wait and, taking me in his arms with all the care with which a flower is harvested, he would gallop us on his white horse among the endless lawns and plains.

The script was perfect, I just needed to find someone who could follow him my way.

One fact is that Rapunzel was not ceased to be my favorite tale for having understood that there was nothing more sexist than demanding that a helpless girl wait for her savior, spending her time on female futilities. Much less for having waited for a stereotype that would never inhabit the real world. No. I don't believe in fairy tales because I found my golden-haired prince and what he offered me were not flowers and an eternal love, but an avalanche of darkness and pain, sweeping part of my existence with his lack of reciprocity.

He didn't follow the script, and neither was I good enough to demand his performance. My forgotten castle collapsed on my head, and the shrapnel knocked down my crown and misrepresented my royal title.

Maybe I had a hard time believing that I was never a princess, and that my black hair like a night without stars was not strong enough to sustain my fall. Or, who knows, my golden-haired prince was nothing more than a man whose existence had become my source of support. A mistake, I admit it. Everyone knows that one should not seek happiness based on a sudden relationship.

I didn't know, until today.

In this way, here I am, in front of a steep iron staircase, with the company of closed stores that are blackened by the shadows of the imminent dawn. I am hearing an echo that wanders from the activity that follows down there, eyes blurred by the repressed cry and a twisted stomach in a strong knot. My damp eyelashes stick to the hair strands blown by the wind, and disturb my blurred and undulating vision. I know I'm no longer in my right mind.

The world seems to rotate at a different frequency, sinking into my feet firmly attached to the bright sidewalk. With stiff and trembling fingers, I hold on to the handrail that hurts me like a hot iron. I can barely breathe through my compressed lungs in a burning inspiration. The only certainty I have is that I shouldn't have arrived at that bar so soon.

I shouldn't have opened the double door with the most serene hope of finding my future husband sharing drinks with our co-workers. Not even going up the stairs to the first floor of that pub overlooking the center and peaceful decoration, eager to tell you about my wonderful day at work as President of Maxwell Enterprises.

Dean never complained when I started talking, it seemed that he often didn't listen to me clearly, but he never asked me to shut up. His legendary patience and sense of humor were the first characteristics that beat my heart, and I never really knew what had attracted him to me in such an unexpected way.

Not that I consider myself ugly. Up close, the ambiguity of shades that oscillate between blue and green in my eyes fades through the golden ring around my pupils, transforming the color into a soft honey. I am blessed with remnants of a hereditary splendor, although my traits are mediocre by themselves. My physiognomy has always been too confusing to be understood.

Ignoring my intimate drama, I continued the path that would take me to the top of the small bar. My self-depreciating thoughts slid away in a soft sigh of the breeze in my hair, and I opened my best smile when I found the table of my supposed friends. But, just under two meters away from the squeaks and drunken laughter, I froze.

The murmur stuck in my throat and I choked, shaking my hand against the tip of the nearest table. In a snap of separate lips, Dean turned and his blue eyes widened when he saw me standing, brought forward in twenty minutes from the correct time to leave work. Rising slowly from where she had been sitting, was the secretary of her sector, with swollen lips and stunned expression.

I was stuck. My knees didn't obey me and my hand refused to let go of the table. Neither of them had deigned to offer me any excuse. They didn't move. Not because they were as paralyzed as I was, but simply because they were interrupted during a moment that I was convinced that I was not the first. The guilty expression on the face of each of our common friends made this fact very clear. Internally I imagined how much that joke weighed on my shoulders and amused each of them each day of shared work. They weren't my friends, in the end.

The pair of traitors only showed some emotion when I gathered all my dignity and dragged myself away, descending to the stumbles and pushes through the crowded room. They didn't follow me right away. I wondered if they finished what they started, but I didn't dare come back to check it out. Instead, I decided to sit on the cold sidewalk, unaware of the fact that my comfortable and expensive textured overcoat would no longer be worth anything because of the dust that covered the floor.

My elbows marked a painful point above my knees covered by a thick black pantyhose, and my pencil skirt had been stained by the tears shed on the black fabric, but I kept my head resting on my hands. That was wrong. Damn wrong. It wasn't the way my perfect script should follow. And I couldn't understand where I was wrong in writing my own perfect story. Everything was fine until twenty-four hours before.

Dean and I would get married in a few days. My family had put aside the grudge for old decisions and was willing to help me with the preparations. Penelope, my only best friend - and thank heaven, the only person absent at that moment - had been gathering each of my wishes in a special spreadsheet for the realization of my dream wedding. We were the only ones who had a sense of how important that step would be.

No one else understood how the emptiness in my chest was only filled by Dean's presence, and how I ardently wanted to seal an appointment after five years of dating. Five years that were thrown into the drain by a night of fraternization when I arrived at the wrong time. One night that had everything to be the happiest of my life, if they had all followed my damn script.