Frozen Heart

She once believed in love. She always wanted one of those stories—the ones about love at first sight or an accidental bump-in at the grocery store, right in the aisle between loneliness and love, surrounded by the frozen foods witnessing the immediate thawing of two frozen hearts. So much so that she found herself running into potential husbands in the market or always telling herself that he was “the one” before they even exchanged phone numbers. These strangers were polite enough, often apologizing and scuttling off to what she believed were their love-filled lives. They didn’t need to thaw their hearts because they were already ablaze with passion and desire. So she would slink back to aisle loneliness, where her frozen heart had nothing to offer them. She knew it was silly, but the fairy-tale believing part of her wanted so badly to believe it all: love at first sight, prince charming, and a thawed-out frozen foods section.

            After years, that part of her was nearly dead now, and her heart stone cold. She no longer believed in happy endings, and scoffed at those who said it was love at first sight, those who proclaimed they knew he was “the one.” Liars, she thought, there’s really no such thing. She figured they were all like she was, telling themselves this fair tale any time they had a new lover, on the off-chance they could actually put up with one another long enough to think they were in love and get hitched. Then they had their story. They lived on the blindness of desire and societal pressure—this is how it’s supposed to go. College Job Boyfriend Marriage. The order or necessity of all seemed irrelevant. Afraid of being alone, they had settled, and they now tell all their friends the lie about how it was love at first sight, when that’s what they had told themselves hundreds of times. In truth, they were miserable, wondering if they really were in love. If love was even real.

            She knew. She no longer wanted the fairy tale. No longer wanted love because she had learned long ago that love did not exist.           

            She wanted real life.

            And to be completely real, she stopped believing in love.