I’m not proud of the person I’ve become, the harsh, uninviting and unwanted girl I’ve grown into. When I was younger I would sit with my friends in the park and we would discuss who we wanted to be when we grew up. My answer was always the same. I wanted to be true. I wanted to be honest. Most of all, I wanted to be someone who was loved, and could love back. Today though, I am none of those things. I am the girl who screwed up. I am the girl who made mistakes and had too much pride to go back and fix them. I am the girl who broke every bridge she had once made between herself and her childhood friends. I am the girl who can’t remember how it feels to smile, to laugh, to mess around. Why? Because my name is Jordan and I ran away from my problems.

I was just ten years old when I discovered the truth about love, but this is not a romantic tale of a girl falling in love with a boy and him not returning the favour. There are several reasons why this could NOT be one of those stories. The first is simple: when I was ten years old I discovered that the idea of ‘love’ did not exist in the real world. If love was real, I had reasoned, my dear father, who supposedly ‘loved’ me, would not have walked out on our family to be with another woman. That was pure lust and greed. I was just ten years old when I realised that lust and greed made people do terrible things. Lust and greed made my father return to us. That and rejection from the other woman, but that is another story.

I was still a child, though admittedly I was almost sixteen, when further proof that love did not exist, if that was necessary, appeared in my broken harm, further weakening my broken mind. I was still a child when my father and my mother erupted into a huge argument in front of their children, whom they ‘loved’ so much they were willing to stay together so as not to screw my charming brother’s mind as they had done mine. I was still a child when my father slammed the door behind him. I was still a child when I hid in my room, cowering under the desk, hoping he would return later. Thankfully I was still a child when he did. In my opinion, on that day I was more of a child than I had ever been before.

My brother is now ten years old, and I am nineteen. Many people would call me young, but my heart has been ravaged by the discoveries I have made in my time on this planet. There is no evidence to prove that ‘love’ exists, nor is there reason to believe in hope, faith and truth. In the face of lies and deceit, I envy the man who can still dream of a better future. I envy the man who does not shy away from difficulty. I envy the man who can stand up for himself and have the audacity to come out of the dark times, or better yet, the man who is strong enough not to enter those dark places in the first place. I envy the man who has never met me.

I was seventeen when I ‘fell in love’ so to speak. In my case, however, I knew it was simple lust, and therefore I kept it to myself. Two years have passed and I haven’t spoken a word of my lust to anyone, but it continues to haunt me. Today I saw the object of my ‘lust’ for the first time in several days, and everything was just the same: he smiled, we hugged, we talked and then he left. He always leaves. I am now nineteen, and I still believe that ‘love’ does not exist. That is not to say, however, that I do not wish eternally that it did.

Signed,
Cassie