What to do with a thousand love letters

Amari Ayako was, to say the least, your regular top student.  Sharp, skillful and reliable; knew how to make clothes, draw and paint. If anyone needed an advice, she would be there; always smiling, always so bright and perfect. She was admired by everybody else. She was just so perfect, and yet...

So utterly and disgustingly resentful. Under the smiling facade hid a rotten and ice-cold heart. "Everyone's so lucky in love but me" she recited as a mantra, hiding behind books while spying on her friends and their boyfriends. "But who cares?! I bet they'll break up soon enough, that guy doesn't suit her at all!"

She bottled up those words, as her mind would pronounce them, they would materialize into pieces of paper inside her plastic pencil case. As they would fill it completely, she had to spend time burning them all... as she did, though, for some reason, tears fell from her eyes.

"Must be the smoke coming out of those" she thought and she would cry all night long. Yet, on the next day, she would convince herself to be bright and fake again.

Ayako was, to say the most, your non-regular heart broken. She had tried everything before.

"As many say on TV shows and novels, nerdy girl is never popular". As a regular 90's fake princess, she had taken those words as a statement and as those nerdy girls getting a complete makeover and finding love afterwards, she had decided she needed to become beautiful. So she had gotten her face covered on make up, layer over layer, pink on her cheeks, red on her lips. Her eyelashes as long as fake ones could get. And it was not until she found herself with those swollen and poppy fish eyes on one morning that she was forced to stop using it.

Well, then, plan B. If it's not the looks, the personality will be. To be a charming lady, she studied all the actresses on doramas, rehearsed and rehearsed. But as soon as she would reach the sight of a boy, her curly hair would eventually turn into a mess, her lines would drop and eventually she was again awkward and silly. An utter failure at love.

Plan C will have to do, then? "Dumb down" said other girls and teachers "guys don't like girls to be smart". Plan D, "don't be nervous around guys, you have to pretend more, be less obvious". Plan E, "don't even look for anyone, the blue prince will eventually come". But from the swamp nothing but frogs can come out, and a tree which roots are not stable enough, with the slightest breeze would falter. Pretending and acting was never the way to solve it. In the end it was but an act, in the end they could all see it... the disgusting pieces of her broken heart in the middle of the black hole that was her chest.

"Is there no way I can ever be loved?" she questioned herself while seeing how her female friends were all drowning on thousands and thousands of love letters.

"Could I be fundamentally wrong? "Could I be defective?" she wondered.

As the end of the world was just announced, even if she pretended nothing had changed, deep inside her heart did an entire flip.

"No way!!!" she thought "I'm going to die without ever loving! To hell with my good grades! Who cares about all of that if you've never ever drank the oh so sweet nectar of love!"

That night, at her house's backyard, while burning another bunch of remorseful words, her tears rolling down her cheeks, she decided it: no matter what, she would break that curse, destroy it, burn it along all those undelivered love letters she has held for all her crushes.

"Before the world ends in one month, I'll get myself a boyfriend!" she exclaimed and she set more fire to the flames to burn all those letters she had never delivered, rain surprised her.