Once upon a time, there lived a girl in a faraway town, in the middle of nowhere. Shy, timid, and quiet the girl was, but strong willed and courageous she was. You see this girl had been through so much in her
years, an old soul, grew up too fast. This girl was not beautiful, nor was she ugly, she was plain. It was her plainness that made her who she was. This girl was a lover. She loved all things beautiful and ugly.
But the girl had an awful secret. She wore a mask, a mask that hid who she truly was. Even though her exterior was strong, and a frown was never on her face, this girl was sad. She cried herself to sleep, she
cried to herself in the shower, she just cried. She cried from the stress of trying to love, trying to live. She cried for those less fortunate. She cried for the soldiers, for the orphans, for the elderly. But mostly,
she cried for herself. She cried because of how heavy the mask was, about how hard it was to keep the mask on, and how, no matter how hard she tried, nobody saw through it. That is...until he came along. He
was new, handsome, and kind. He saw through her mask, he saw the hurt, the pain. He saw her. But the girl was weary of letting somebody in. The boy knew better than to push her, for he himself, had been
through everything she had been through. He too wore the mask at one point. And the girl knew this. She could tell that he had been through everything she was going through. Slowly the girl began to trust
him, and slowly but surely, she let him in. She dropped the mask and spilled to him her struggles, her tears, her hardships. Together they fixed her, mended her, lifted the weight from her shoulders. All was
well with her world, until tragedy stuck. One day the boy never came to see her, and worried, she went to him, but he was not home. He had left. No word, nothing, only a single rose on his front steps with a
note that read Goodbye. The girl was heartbroken, and slowly, the mask was rebuilt, and she went back to her ways of false happiness, fake smiles, and a life of crying to herself. Time went by and the girl
found herself constantly thinking of the boy who had walked in and out of her life, and as she watched the news on a quiet Wednesday night, she saw it. His picture was in the corner as the anchor read the
story. And then the dreaded words rang through her ears as she turned the volume up. " One soldier dead after a bombing in Iraq." The boy was a soldier. He had been on leave and had moved to the small town
to recover from physical and emotional injuries. When the leave was up, he was once again deployed, leaving the the girl all alone. His mask was that of a soldiers, far worse than hers. Tears welled up in her
eyes as she listened to the anchorman speak.
"It is said that the soldier was on his way back to the Americas when a bomb hit the truck, he was the only casuality" She couldn't believe it. He had been on his way home. He was coming back. And then he
was murdered. Killed. Dead. What she was hearing had to be a dream. In the months that she had known the soldier she had fallen in love with him. He, the only person who saw the real her, and now he was
dead. She now cried for a new reason. She cried for her lost love, and for the soldier that fought and died for her country. She cried for his family. And now, after all of this, the tears stopped, and were replaced
with anger, and dread. Her lips pursed, and her fists clenched, and her vocal chords clenched. The world was cruel and unfair. She had loved and lost the only thing important in her life. Where was her happy
ending? After all of this, the struggles that she had gone to be happy. Weeks passed, and the girl was numb, brokenhearted, a soul in a shell of a person. Years had passed and the girl had moved on, finished
her schooling, and had gone to a university where she met her husband who she would later lose. She had learned to love once again, had dropped the mask once again, and was happy. But the soldier was not
forgotten. Though she had married, and moved on from the small faraway town she had grown up in, she still went back every day to put a single rose on his grave. The girl grew old, and her husband passed,
and her children had stopped visiting, but every day, after seventy years had passed since she had last seen him alive, she would make the thirty mile drive to his grave, just to put a single rose on his grave,
until the day she knew she would pass away. And on that last day, she drove the thirty miles to his grave and left single rose on his grave with a note attached. And as she walked away, back to her car, she
could feel him watching her, smiling down from his place in heaven, looking as young as he did the last time she had seen him, a smile on his handsome face, waiting to once again hold her in his arms. She died
peacefully in her sleep that night, clutching the old, dogeared note to her chest, the old, dried rose sitting on her bed side table, crumbling and breaking, a smiled on her face, because after seventy years, she
knew she would finally be reunited with her true love along with her late husband once again. There once lived a girl in a faraway town, who after eighty seven years of struggle, finally had her happy ending.