The princess and the whore

She believed in a fairy tale life, says my friend. A happily ever after. That's what she wanted. And I? Quite the opposite. What I wanted was a wealth of experiences. Different men (and women), different countries, anything I could find, everything I could take. I said I wouldn't let society stop me. She was part of it. And now look at us both. Three years in college. 21 years old. And we are such completely different people. Still the opposite of each other, but oh how we've changed! The princess got not one charming prince in a castle, but instead many drunken fools at the inn. The wannabe whore on the other hand was betrothed to a scribe.
Is this what my life is going to be? Doing what I 'must', living as others want me to? Trying not to hurt anyone, although being unhappy myself? You are lucky, they say to me. You have everything one can want, they say, a good education, a wonderful partner, a settled life. But this is not what I want. I want excitement, I want wildness, I want to experience everything that life has to offer me. I want to take all the men I can find, and all the women too. I want to ride a bike on a mountainside in the Philippines and visit the Dalai Lama. I want to smoke up every day for two weeks and have sex with a different man everyday. I wanna go bungee jumping and white water rafting and para gliding and sky diving. I want to feel fear like I've never felt before and eat food that I've never tasted before.
But I won't do them. Because I don't dream. Because I tell myself that they're right, that I have the life that everyone wants, that I just need to get used to it. This is where I belong, they tell me. And I listen. So maybe my friend is right. I will marry the scribe one day and become a professor. And when I have grandchildren, I won't be able to tell them my stories, because I won't have any.
And her, the beautiful Princess of Andalesia? She will divest herself of her robes and her crown and she will spend her life in the inn. And we will both hate the lives we lead and curse it with the choicest of words. And we will look back at the persons we were, wondering why our dreams faded, why we let them go by. I like to think things will be different, that we will both one day find what we are looking for, that we won't spend our whole lives searching, searching....