The Scar That Never Shows

*Warning* Understand that some mornings I am extraordinarily skeptic and disgusted with our culture. This is one of these mornings.

It seems as though the strains of being are all tangled in a mesh of harsh February lies. Can anything be so horridly confused?
We paint a picture of what life, and love, should be. But it's nothing of romance novels -- pain fused with passion and betrayal is never accurately represented. Envisioning a sweet, silent suffering only serves to kill you more. They lie; our books of fairytale delight scornfully exploit every weakness we are prey to.
And yet we continue. Our ideal of a perfect imperfection twists our minds and our hearts into a tangled, clinging, and distorted knot of perceived control. I know what I want, I know which character of fiction I will model myself after, so who's to say I cannot have the life she has? A life that is not on the page of a book deigns that you can never have the life your heroine, or rather her author, created. But still we simper and pine for an illusion, justifying our schizophrenic craze with the knowledge that nothing is perfect and the imperfection is really what we seek. Dysfunction.

Children are born and raised with the constant telling of stories. Cinderella's prince rescued her from a life of servitude. Snow White's true love saved her from the clutches of jealousy. Sleeping Beauty's man saved her from a dragon. Belle changed Beast into a man with whom she could live happily ever after.

Belle revolutionized romance with the Let Me Fix You With My Love mentality. I see your imperfections. I see the scars that disfigure your character. I see the marred judgment and mentality. I see the anger and the disgust. I see everything you hate about yourself. I see everything you cannot see. But it's alright. I love you for them, and that being the case, you will change those things because I accept them. I can fix you with my love because my love will fix anything. And the only thing left unseen is the fact that love and acceptance by itself cannot change anything. Breaking hearts is easy when there's no shield to protect them from the love that they're beating for.

What is Happily Ever After? Is it love? Or is it settling down and realizing that every chronicle of romance is a fabricated truth?

We are a scarred people, wounded by our fancies and handicapped by our pride. But it remains unseen, shrouded by the illusion that there's always something better, something that should be in a book, or a film instead of in reality. We are a scarred people.