"Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly."

I closed my worn copy of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes and looked at the clock. It was 8:20. So maybe I did have a few more hours of peace.

Hope.

An emotion, a feeling- so dangerous yet so, so tempting. I often wondered why the writers never bothered to include the downsides, the negatives and all the destruction that came with having the slightest bit of hope. Why do they only choose to show the brighter side of the coin? I end up answering myself, so that maybe people wouldn't lose hope?

A fat load of good that did.

***

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

~ Anne Frank"

***

I held onto hope- I really did. I tried my best, I worked my best, I did everything I could so that maybe- just maybe...

I was naive. I still am perhaps, denying it would be lying to myself and I won't do that. Acceptance is a trait I have picked up over the years and it has helped me through situations and let me keep my sanity. I'm grateful to it.

I don't want to sound ungrateful and I certainly know that people have it far worse than me. But in the privacy of my room, I like to pity myself, I like to mourn the girl who couldn't have it all. The one who had to peek through windows of a stranger's house to know what the word the English teacher assigned us to write an essay on meant.

It was family.

Don't get me wrong. I don't have black and blue bruises running up and down my arms every day of the week. I don't get raped at every turn I take or get beaten into oblivion for every wrong word I speak. I can take the occasional slaps, their need for the portrayal of perfection to the outside world, the unspoken hatred in their eyes and the visible disgust that flashes through their faces as soon as they see me.

What I cannot take is the ignorance, the dismissal, the pretending to act as if I don't exist.

Well, unless they are training me to be their idea of perfection.

They never tell you how much it hurts. I remember in first grade, a fellow classmate was sick and she was collected by her mother from school earlier than usual. I remember her frantically barging into the nurse's office to look for her kid. My six-year-old self was utterly perplexed that a mother could care for her child that way. But that was the first day I understood.

I understood that I was unwanted. I was the mistake, the burden. I was the very being that ruined their brightest days and whose only purpose was to relieve frustrations. I was the part of their lives that they wish didn't exist.

And I understood.

__________

Sooo....there you have it.

This is a beginning to a, if I say so myself, very exciting journey. I know I've barely introduced her but I plan on doing it properly over the chapters.

♡♡