A Girl Who Could Never Be Brave Enough | Fragments from the Diary of a Lost Girl

September 16, 2017

Dear diary,

I was never a brave girl. When I was six, I fell down the stairs of my school and hurt my head. There were no serious injuries but I still ran home crying and screamed and screamed for my father until he enclosed me in his arms, whispering soothing words all the while. When I was eleven, I fell while trying to skate. With scratched elbows, bleeding knees, shaking body and barely contained sobs, I reached home. Swallowed my tears, tried to put on a brave facade and told my father in a high pitched, wobbly voice that I was okay, I was okay, I was okay. I think those words for me just as much as they were for my father who was staring at me with something like sympathy in his eyes. Eyes that could see through me. Eyes that made me feel fragile, breakable, weak when all I wanted was for him to say, "Yes, my baby girl. It's all okay. Look how brave you've become!".

I am eighteen now and I'm drowning. I don't know what I'm drowning in, maybe sadness, maybe oblivion, but what I know is that it hurts and my wounds are no longer capable of healing. My father no longer looks at me with that look in his eyes as though I'm broken and need fixing by him, and I don't know if that's a good thing or bad. I'm still not brave even though the tears don't come anymore, even though my throat feels too tight to scream these days, too tight to ask for help. I'm still falling apart, still bleeding and still not brave enough because there is a sickness inside of me and I'm losing myself to it every day, every minute, every second and someday it's going to swallow me whole and like the coward I am, I'm not going to fight it.

Maybe somewhere down the road the definition of brave became blurred to me or maybe..maybe I never really knew what brave actually meant.

Love,

Leela.

 

 Okay, yeah. I'm going to pretend I never wrote this.

Picture credits:  F