Someone Else's Love Story

(Background: this is the result of a writing prompt. Therefore, it is a rough draft and kind of weird. Enjoy. =D)

Falling in love was the first mistake I made.

At the time, it had seemed like a sensible idea. After all, I was fresh out of college and had my whole life in front of me, and my inquisitive relatives always wanted to know who that "special someone" was for me. It didn't take me long to get tired of their constant questioning and speculating as to who that lucky guy would be. So I went out into the world with the intention of finding that guy and giving him some of that well-deserved luck.

I found him, all right - all gorgeous twenty-six years of him. But sometimes I still wonder if I was ever really in love with him. It felt like it, but I was always on such an emotional roller coaster that I never quite knew what I really thought of anything. But he was exactly the type of guy that all my inquisitive relatives had always dreamed about, so I claimed him before any other girl had a chance. I guess I should have brushed up on my cliches first. Maybe I would have remembered that haste makes waste.

Well, here we are, six years later. I'm standing next to the grave of my ex-fiance, barely noticing the drops of rain that run down my face in the absence of the tears I would have shed. The rain is turning the dirt I'm standing on into thick mud, and my shoes are going to be ruined. But I don't care. I inhale slowly and deeply and take a look around the cemetery. Even the trees are dead and lifeless. How did it come to this? Why did I ever believe all of those fairy tale stories about how love was supposed to be? Snow White and Cinderella must have been liars, or idealists, or both. Life never happened that way for me.

My relatives were wrong. My love story cooled down fast and died way before its time. If I've learned anything, it's that life is too short to waste it on trying to live up to anyone else's expectations. Next time I ought to pay more attention to what I want and not try to live out my great-aunt's ideal romance. If I had done that the first time, maybe he and I would never have had that last argument that left us both distraught. Maybe he never would have run that red light if he had been thinking clearly. Maybe he would still be alive and able to make another girl's dream come true. He never fulfilled mine, but I couldn't hate him no matter how hard I had tried. And now it was all over and done with.

Now the tears are coming. I close my eyes to try to shield them, but it doesn't work. They fall anyway, mixing with the raindrops that soak the stone cross at the head of the grave.