Disclamer: I do not own anything.
Sometimes she felt like she didn't even know who she was anymore. She would walk around the beach at night and wonder when it was that she lost herself so completely. She used to be so sure of herself when she was younger. Never had any doubts about who she was, or who she wanted to be. But now, now that she had reached her goals and everything she ever dreamed of had come true, now she couldn't understand why she had ever wanted this… No, that wasn't true, she knew why she wanted it, what she couldn't understand was why she didn't feel any pleasure in any of it. How could it be possible for her to feel so empty and just utterly indifferent towards everything? This was her moment to shine! This was her time to enjoy the fruits of her labor. Yet all she could feel was dread. Dread that she had to get up from bed in the morning, dread that she had to go to work and be nice to everyone. And most of all, dread that she had to pretend to actually care about her fiancé.
She tried to think when she started feeling this way, when she stopped caring about everything. But, though she had spent countless hours on the beach at night thinking about this, she never could find an answer. Maybe she had always been this way? When she thought back, she thought maybe she could remember traces of how she was feeling now. She couldn't ever remember feeling anything more than a slight affection for any of her previous boyfriends. She remembered seeing how badly it affected her friends and classmates when they broke up with their boyfriends. She actually had a friend who cried her eyes out for days after the boy she had been casually hooking up with for less than two weeks "broke up" with her. She never understood why they would care, after all, a boy is just a boy, and there are plenty more fish in the sea. Even though she had never told anyone, she always felt relieved when one of her relationships ended. While the boy was sad and upset, she was always left with a slight sense of freedom. A feeling of finally being able to stop pretending to care more than she did. She knew what people at school used to call her, hell she even heard her friends use the term on more than one occasion. Ice Queen. It never bothered her. She knew how she seemed to other people, emotionless and cold. But that was just how she was; she couldn't remember a time when she had been found of intimacy, whether emotionally or physical. Now, that's not to say she didn't enjoy sex. In fact, she enjoyed it quite a lot. She was the first of her friends to lose her virginity, not that she ever told them, and never once had she regretted that decision. She had always been a firm believer in privacy. If her friends felt the urge to talk about their first times than that was their choice, but she had never understood why they would want other people to know something so personal about them. Her first time was everything she hoped it would be; hot and with someone she knew she would never meet again. She couldn't imagine anything worse than having to run into the person you lost your virginity to on a daily basis. No, she had no regrets, she went on vacation with her mother and her boyfriend when she was fourteen, and while they were busy flirting with each other, she went to the beach where she met a tall dark stranger.
Maybe it was time for her to realize that she would never be like the other people, time to stop waiting for things to change…
Here she stood, in the most beautiful garden she had ever seen, knowing that everything had been arranged especially for her. As if she cared, they could have been standing in a damp cellar and she would be feeling the same impassiveness towards it. But this was her time to put a smile on her red lips and pretend to be happy. It was too late to change her mind, even if she wanted to, which she wasn't sure she did. If her choices was to be alone and unhappy or unhappy with company, was one really better than the other?
As she heard the music start and she began walking, she though, for the first time in twelve years, that maybe it wouldn't be so bad to spend her life with someone else…