Chapter II – Love and Other Disasters

Love, for me, was always but a fleeting feeling. Sadly, it was never something long-lasting or substantial. The few times that I thought I had fallen in love, it was never love as much as a crush here and there. It definitely wasn't LOVE in capital letters: the all-encompassing, earth-shattering feeling that fills a void we never knew was there with sudden meaning. I don't intend to sound grandiose, but I have never experienced the kind of love that makes life worth living, a love where you finally understand why we were put on this Earth.

Besides, I am sad to say that whenever I have fallen for someone, I was never loved in return. Is that a love worth fighting for? Would there have been a point? I never thought so, therefore never taking risks for love and never pursuing the matter. When in love, I felt that the feeling solely concerned me, for I feared that if I were to show my affection publicly, I would be ridiculed mercilessly and my already fragile heart would break into a million pieces. I wanted to soak up that feeling, to wallow in it as long as it lasted until it slowly simmered away like a dying flame. I have been hurt before countless times in varied ways, even opening up about my feelings for someone once when I was a child. Yet, every time I have opened up to someone about a most intimate part of my abundance of feelings, it has been used against me to hurt me. I was treated like a toy whose feelings could be played with.

I never forgot what Lucinda once did to me. After my father and I had moved into Ravenshead when I was twelve years of age and I was newly enrolled at the same school my stepsisters attended, Lucinda wickedly decided to expose a secret I had entrusted her with. In my first week at my new school, I had noticed a tall, dark haired boy with eyes as blue as sapphires. His name, it turned out, was George Abernathy. This boy was four years my senior and I fell head over heels for him after seeing him for the first time. I simply could not take my eyes off him. He was such a beautiful creature and, well, I was young. When he was nearby, it was hard for me to hide my affection for him. Lucinda, shrewd as she was, noticed how fidgety I became when he was around and pestered me until I told her the truth: that I had a crazy crush on this boy.

Later on that day, Lucinda must have taken it upon herself to reveal my secret to George in order to humiliate me. In due time, the whole school knew about my feelings for him. I felt ashamed and could not make eye contact with George (or any boy for that matter) after this incident in case they would assume I fancied them. Maybe this was alarmist, but I was a shy girl and did not know how to respond to such ridicule. From then on, I knew to be careful around Lucinda. I had entrusted this intimate piece of information about myself to her and she had abused my trust, my pure faith in her, only to stab me in the back for her own amusement. What a cruel, hateful creature! She had mocked my innocence by revealing my feelings of affection to the first boy I had ever fallen for. Love, to Lucinda, was but a game, and a dangerous one at that. I was still untainted in many ways, but had experienced my first deceit at that point in my young life. Ironically, my middle name, Amande, which is of French origin, translates to "worthy of love", which I never believed to be in my younger years.

I encountered more cruelty amongst my peers as I grew into my teens, because I have always been different, starting with my glowing red hair, pale skin, and deep blue eyes. Where I grew up, nobody else looked like me, so I always stood out. I simply could not help it. My appearance also stood out in other ways. My mother was never concerned with the latest fashion or trendy clothes shops, so I wore no-name garments, taking no heed to how I looked (although I looked perfectly fine). The truth is, I was never bothered with superficialities until I encountered girls in my class who made fun of me for wearing, say, a horse-sweater, which was bright red, with an image of a farm house and horse printed on the front in bright colours. I was thirteen at the time. How childish of me! Did I not have the right to dress as I pleased? What gave those loathsome, vile creatures the audacity to criticise me when they only had peas for brains themselves?

The many encounters with cruelty and bullying in my past have surely scarred me, yes. However, I have grown stronger for it as well and I know now that the "demons" from my past never had the right to push me around or intimidate me in the first place, but that their need to hurt others came from a deep void within themselves. They turned me into a wallflower, into a little mouse who tried to become invisible, inconspicuous. I made every effort to blend in; the bullying wore off, as it always does in the end. A new victim was found and I was left scarred, more fragile than before and increasingly insecure. As a matter of fact, I still have to work on my confidence and self-worth these days as well as on realising that I have my place in this world, as we all do. What I am trying to say is, ultimately, that I have always had the distinct feeling that I was born out of place and somehow also out of time. I long for old-fashioned values and genteel manners. I long for straightforwardness over unworldliness. I was beyond my years in comparison to those girls that teased me, because I was not childish as they were. I was generous and humble. I still feel like I am good to the core and possibly a tad naïve, but I am still young, so is that not essentially my unalienable right? Yes, I am inclined to dream and to see the world through rose-coloured glasses, but what is wrong with dreaming or with having an untainted heart, I ask you? Is that not also my right? Now that I reflect upon it, maybe I am so often disappointed because my expectations of people are so high, so unrealistically high. That is probably the reason why I often need to escape from this world, which can be harsh and unforgiving.