In My Next Life I'll Win the Heart of the Male Lead

My first life ended abruptly, and without much meaning, which fit the rest of my life entirely. There's absolutely nothing worth noting that happened in my childhood - the most extraordinary part of my childhood is how ordinary and boring it was. Everything I did was expected, normal.

And that was fine.

I didn't look longingly into the windows hoping for anything better or different. I was content to be a boring and average person.

In my highschool years I met my first love.

He was beautiful, at least to my eyes.

Clever, strong, and confident. He wasn't quite as average and normal as I was, because I was the kind of person you might forget as soon as you looked away from me, but he also wasn't incredibly popular and successful.

He never let that get him down, he seemed just as content with life as I was, and when he looked at me I thought 'this is how it feels to be special'.

We married after we graduated, and while he went to university I started a career to support us. And everything was fine.

Except that it wasn't, because 'normal' isn't 'perfect', and marrying a man slightly more interesting than me didn't make me special after all. 

A part of 'a normal life' is walking in on your significant other in the middle of an affair at some point, isn't it?

When I came home I wasn't early, and I'd even stopped for groceries on the way. When I entered the room, what I remember most about it was how absolutely cold his eyes were when he looked up at me. He didn't try to cover himself, he didn't offer excuses.

He didn't bother to say anything at all.

When he looked at me, I realized I was never special to him in the first place. 

I don't know how long I'd been forcing the relationship with the thought that I was special to him, but he never objected to the divorce, never said a word of protest, and never made an attempt to defend himself.

I don't know what her name was, the woman he was with, but perhaps she was someone special.

It's normal to experience grief and loneliness after a break up, to feel unwanted in the wake of rejection, and so it's only normal that I felt that after the proceedings. But I continued to work, to live, because it's what normal people did, so of course it's what I did.

I don't remember who first suggested the popular otome game "Magical School Romance" to me. It's possible I simply overheard a conversation about it at work and looked into it myself, but it was something magical to experience. 

The protagonist of the game was named 'Eileen Weiss'. I could rename her, but the first time I played the game I didn't. I didn't think to do so until much later.

Eileen wasn't anything like me: a poor orphan girl raised in a terribly harsh orphanage until she literally fell into the arms of a nobleman when she slipped while trying to climb a tree.

The protagonist, Eileen, was adopted by that very nobleman into a loving family and a position of minor nobility herself.

She stood out in life because she simply didn't fit in: a girl that those with noble blood saw as a jumped-up street rat, a woman with almost unearthly beauty, a constant pure aura, and an indomitable will.

No matter how much she was bullied, no matter how much she struggled, she always remained so cheerful and happy that every single one of the highly attractive and rich men in the game easily fell in love with her.

Even more than that, by the end of the game it turns out that she had ancient royal blood of the emperor all that time anyway, and was rightful heir to the throne after a succession crisis.

Eileen was all the special I could never be, and even though I'd never really cared about having anything more than I already did before, in the wake of losing the man I loved, I loved the feeling of getting to play the special kind of woman whose lover would be too enamored by her to ever consider an affair.

A woman who wouldn't be wrong if she thought she were special to her husband.

In particular, though, there was one route - one man - with whom I fell in love completely.

My second love was fictional, and yet I was obsessive. Viktor Schulte was just a side character, his route had barely anything to do with the main grand plot, but he was beautiful and gentle, quiet and lonely, a sweet doctor who slowly gave up on his dreams of a loving family as all those around him misunderstood his quiet nature for being cruel and cold.

He'd become known as the unfeeling monster of medicine when in truth he was the softest and most emotionally vulnerable of all the routes.

The moment when he finally confessed to Eileen, he spoke with absolute certainty: that he'd rather die on the spot than spend another moment without her love. 

I replayed that route at least a hundred times, eventually renaming Eileen to 'Adelaide', and pretending that he was speaking to me through the screen, that he might be as enamored with me if he'd met me.

It was a fantasy, but a harmless one, and with Viktor I could imagine it without forcing it on another person and expecting them to go along with it.

On the way home from work one day, I crossed a bridge that I always had. Midway across the bridge, it simply collapsed.

Perhaps it was too old of a bridge. Perhaps the storm the night before had weakened it too much. Probably it would have collapsed even if someone hadn't been walking across it right that moment.

No one was nearby when it happened, and no one came looking as I fell, meaningless paperwork fluttering in the air above me higher than my phone, Viktor's face on the lockscreen smiling faintly down at my falling form.

Of course no one came to save me, because no one noticed me. I don't remember drowning, but I know that's how I must have died.