Salem of Gingrah

Somewhere, there was a town in the mountains known to outsiders as The Wound. It was named by travelers who upon seeing the city were struck by the contrast of the red brick of the homes against the emerald of the mountains.
The town was actually called Gingrah and at the heart of it there lived a freckled girl who was known by the caretakers of the orphanage as Marianne, but who called herself Salem. Growing up in the orphanage had caused her to have a wild imagination as there was little to do there besides clean and read books, and she read everything from Aesop's fables to the Oz stories of Baum.
She grew up believing in love and truth and beauty. But soon she grew disillusioned and believed only in love. She was no scholar and no artist and so her quests for truth and beauty were ill-fated.
"But I can be a lover," she said. "I believe in love with all my heart."
She was not a bad looking girl, though her hair was a bit coarse and her cheeks dirty. Her limbs were not athletic, but they were feminine. She was pale from staying indoors and her eyes were a piercing blue. She was attractive in the right light at the right angle, as her caretakers used to tell her.
But for some reason, all the boys preferred her best friend Emma, even though, Marianne thought, she was not any more attractive than herself.
"They'll grow tired of her. She's smarter than me and perhaps more interesting, but she doesn't want to be a lover. She doesn't believe in love like I do."
So she waited, but the boys did not tire of Emma, and they did not grow to like Marianne any more than they already did. And so she failed at the role of the lover.
This cast her into a deep sadness that lasted three long years. In that time she grew to see herself as everyone else saw her. A poor, dirty, ugly girl with few redeeming qualities.
But she did have some, and among them was passion. She had given up her quest for the perfect love, for any love, but she held hope in her heart. Because people cannot go on when there is no hope. And so she held tightly to the quiet thought that perhaps one day her true love would arrive.
Over time she lost the faint glow in her cheeks, and her piercing eyes became flat and placid. Her limbs became bony. She grew old in the outskirts of the city, away from the orphanage and her friends. And one day she died, her dead body unable to hold onto the hope that had sustained her all the days of her life.
And the girl with the passion disappeared into the mountains forever.