What Happens After A “Happily Ever After”

“…..and they lived happily ever after.”

*ten years and a hundred realizations later*

“That was once upon a time.”

Blind eyes and deaf ears are some of the most favourably used weapons in a human being’s mental arsenal as he defends himself against anything that assaults the innocence of his senses. While malfunctioning sense organs are definitely prized possessions to have during tough times, they do not find a place in the realization of some truths, one of which is the fact that we live in the time machine scientists are working so meticulously to invent.

It’s true. We could flip across a few pages of green meadows and sunlit days to greet the words “happily ever after” and we could turn back a few and start afresh with “Once upon a time”. We could fill up the pages with a few choice words, or leave the blank with untouched memories. The point is, we get to decide when our “Once upon a time” is, and when we can close a chapter and put it away….and that it’s ridiculous how most of us remain aloof and ignorant of this final “Moral of the Story”.

What DOES happen after a “happily ever after”? In the scenarios we’re familiar with, what comes after these words primarily comprises the hard-bound back cover of the fairy tale and maybe a list of other such tales, fairly unread. In today’s scenario (by today, I mean the traditional acne flare-ups and teenage tantrums later), we generally o hunting ourselves. Driven by adrenaline and fuelled by imagination, this hunt is a weird concoction of all the customary teenage fables , broken experiences, ecstatic memories and torn textbooks. (Let’s throw in the blind eyes and deaf ears too) We run inside and out, back and forth, looking for the evasive old “happily ever after”. What we completely sidestep though, is that we’ve probably already found it once and lost it, found it yet again, and lost it, yes, once again. And I choose to believe that it is normal. After all, when we live in our very own time-machine with personalized buttons and functions, a few fluctuations from time to time help keep the rampant machine on its toes.

So yes, this is what happens after a “Happily ever after” – we continue searching for more. We lose some, we win some, we start some, we end some. Our “happily ever after”s become our “Once upon a time”s, and those keep us running, chasing and finding more.

I once wrote an article on “Once Upon A Time..”, and that certainly gave me some food for thought. And now here I am, giving that article an ending I hope it deserves. This is one of my “Happily ever after”s. And I’m giving it to you.