"They lived happily ever after"... Or not.

We all remember the bedtime stories of our childhoods. The shoe fits Cinderella, the frog turns into a prince, Sleepy Beauty is awakening with a kiss. Once upon a time, and then they lived happily ever after. Fairy tales. 

I remember that my favorite story was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I really don't know why, I just remember that my dad used to tuck me in and then he started reading me a story, but I used to beg for him to read Snow White. As I grew up I forgot all about fairy tales, until last week, when me and my brother were cleaning up our garage and we started reminiscing... There were two boxes one said "Rita's"  and the other "João's", when we opened them, we were expecting old stuff, but instead there were books, and books and books, fairy tales books, and cowboy books and Donald Duck books, and we spent the entire afternoon reading them. We went there to clean, well, we made the mess even bigger, but it was fun. 

After looking for it for almost half an hour I found Snow White's book, and I read it. Twice. And then I started thinking Who on Earth would wake up from the dead with a freaking kiss?. Eventually, I stopped caring. Then, at night, we were exhausted, and the only thing we both wanted to do, was to watch a movie, and so we watched Milk, which is actually one of my favorite movies, and in the end, when he died I thought Okay, now that is common!. 

Of course I preferred that the fairy tale would be the one that came true, but it wasn't, it was the other story. 

The problem is fairy tales never come true. It’s the other stories, the ones that begin with dark and stormy nights and end in the unspeakable. It’s the nightmares that always seem to become reality. Fairy tales don’t come true, reality is much stormy, much murkier, much scarier. People don’t really have happily ever after, people barely have ever after.