"Framed Like A Picture" Flash Fiction

 Every story has a happy ending.

 That's what I'm told, at least. I'm not so sure that's a universal fact so much as a literary tool to make people think they're happy, when the truth is they're miserably incomplete from their first breath to their last. Winners die, losers live. Losers die, winners live. Which of these is the more tragic? The loss of greatness and prevalence of the mourning, or the perishing of those who know no joy? It's a matter of the “decrease [of] the surplus population”, or greatness being torn from someone. We're left with the age-old question, is it better to have loved and lost, or to have never loved at all?

 To have never loved; where's the happy ending in you?

 To have loved and lost, what elation rests in this?

 No, I'm convinced that neither is worthy of jubilation. Only the perfect, idealistic tales of love that end in “happily ever after” are the ones worth having. Yet even these are of mediocrity and generic nothingness. Love is not two who are happy with everything; that's ignorance and bliss. Love is two who fight through torrents and come out exhausted, but also stronger than before.

 Ours should have been lasting. Instead, it led to binding; chafing the wrists with coarse sisal.

 Love is pain. Whether lost, absent, or enduring, it is pain. Why should we strive for such a torment? What's there to gain in love, anyways?

 That may be the wrong question; what's there to maintain in the void of love? What's there to not lose in the perseverance of it?

 The answer is life. The answer is faith. The answer is truth. The answer is hope. The answer is everything.

 Even the most tragic of love, so long as it's true, is more triumphant than the most fulfilling lack of it.

 The voice beyond what I can see informs the gathered of my crimes.

 The rope around my neck tells me I die in vain.

 The heart in my chest says I lived in love.

 And no institution of man can diminish the hope in that.

 Framed like a picture, I'm waiting to fall and shatter.

 They have the wrong man.

 I loved her.

 I lo--