I have long been cradled by a happily ever after.
As a child, amidst my most innate, perpetual longings, I had found significant solace within the stories that lay me to rest at night. I would not part with my fairytale phantasm under any circumstances: my Cinderella princess dress, tattered and torn, endured my first, inaugural bike rides without the vice of my training wheels. My cumbersome The Little Mermaid DVD player was the soundtrack to my escapades, my mornings replete with “Part of Your World” and my evenings brimful with “Under the Sea.” My old cable television, which would, in an outburst, break into a slew of snow on a whim, had long been marred by sticky fingers and the lingering hue of Frozen and Tangled. Christmas left me jubilated with the prospect of a new princess to add to my Barbie collection, and birthdays meant a cake reenactment of my most reiterated and revered Disney movie scenes.
For quite some time since then, I have come to believe that I am no princess.
I am, in all aspects of my life, indebted to my willingness to appropriate someone of a more sapient nature. I have long equated this outlook with some convoluted forward-thinking, my plans arranged in destined fate as I form them from years in the past. My pastimes are filled with objectives of a version of me twenty years from now; I routinely revisit my college essay framework, researching dorms and prom dresses, graduate schools, and the brief knowledge I have of the current state of the housing market. Although I am writing now in sure acknowledgement of my pretentiousness, this ambition steadies me, for where can purpose or fulfillment be found without something to accomplish?
And for some recent time, I have now come to realize that perhaps this yearning is to my own detriment. I remember when I wanted simpler things, whether tangible or not. I wanted silly toys and torrential snow to save my older brother from elementary school days, so he could stay home and keep me company. I wanted daddy-daughter dances and for my stuffed animals to talk back to me. For my father to intertwine my name in made-up songs and for Sunday morning Mickey Mouse pancakes.
But somewhere between Disney songs and dorm room schematics, I stopped asking for magic. I stopped believing that wishing made it so—that love was certain, that villains were obvious, that everything always worked out in the end. I traded in tiaras for transcripts, glass slippers for Google Docs, bedtime stories for carefully laid five-year plans. And in that exchange, something quietly slipped through the cracks.
It’s not that I resent who I’ve become. I’m proud of her—of her precision, her planning, her unwavering hunger for more. But I miss the girl who believed a plastic crown made her royalty, who saw wonder in the ordinary, who imagined that maybe, just maybe, the world was built to be good. I miss the version of myself who could be content with less, because less never felt like lacking. It just felt like life.
I try—on the rare occasion I remember—to let her in again. I hum old lullabies in the shower. I make pancakes with chocolate chips shaped like Mickey’s ears. I take the long way home when it’s snowing, just to pretend the world has slowed down for me. And sometimes, when no one’s looking, I let myself believe in happily ever afters again.
Not because I need them to be true, for I know that such idealization is often intended to be fictional. But, when I am knocking on the door of the end decades from now, I would like to believe that it would be better to leave hope than to leave success, or materials, or physicalities behind, which only festers once reached. It is not always best to leave behind something tangible.
For if I may be indebted to something, perhaps it would be best for it to be something everlasting.
