There I was, all dewy-eyed and eighteen, about to fall Head over Hells in Love. After 6 years in a Catholic Ladies College, I was ready to face the Most Important Experience of my Life. My preparation had been thorough: I had been imbued with the Credo "Love and Marriage go together like a horse and carriage" and the certainty that "if he loves you he'll wait until AFTER you're married", but most of all may teenage romances had fully prepared me to for the Big Event. So I set off, travelling over 2 oceans and 3 or 4 continents, to begin the Best Adventure, Ever!
Needless to say I soon found myself a likely candidate. "He" was everything I had dreamed he'd be: tall, dark and handsome, and so on and so forth. From the first moment that I gazed stupidly into his leonine eyes, I knew that This Was It. I was positive that he was my Prince Charming when I started to dream about "him" every night, and the symptoms of this magical illness were obvious when I started daydreaming about my knight in shining armour saving a poor damsel in distress - namely, me - and carrying me off lovingly to his castle and thereby declaring me his queen. Naïve as I was, I of course knew that this was only wishful thinking on my part: I could hardly expect my Lancelot to spirit me off on his fiery steed when neither of us knew how to ride a horse!
Thus the days rolled on as I sat staring out into space and sighing wistfully, waiting for "It" to happen. And inevitably "It" finally did! I was in Venice, the town of Lovers and Romance, touring - which is no mean feat when your head is in the clouds. I knew that the Time had come for me to become a Woman. I decided that when I got back home, I would take the bull by the horns and actually...TALK to him! So I trotted off home very happily, and I went looking for him in what I knew to be his usual haunts. Alas! My search proved fruitless. I later found that he had gone horse riding. It was a sport he had taken up only recently, together with his fiancée!
I dragged myself home dejectedly and cried my little heart out on my pillow and wished that this was all a bad dream. For a moment I got so depressed that I even considered taking the veil! Then I decided to face the music for the first time in my life and realized that I had been more in Love with Love than with "him" in particular. (He had bad teeth, anyway). So I eventually took it all in stride, especially after I decided that, all things considered, fairy tales do come true, if only in part. Once upon a time I did meet my knight in shining armour, the only problem is that he ended up living "happily ever after" with somebody else!
