In order to understand me, let me start by saying the first book I ever loved was fiction. It wasn’t about reality or truth (which honestly has yet to be proven), it was about myth and other worlds not seen by the untrained eye. This book plucked me away from everything I was facing and presented me with solid problems that could be solved by friendship and swords and magic. It was a diversion. I enjoyed being lied to. I knew my demons by name, but I refused to face them. That’s what happens when you’re the girl everyone expects to find smiling and all of a sudden you forget what that word even means. So I pretended. I googled images of laughing and smiling people and I mimicked them. And because everyone believed me, I became a good liar too. I wonder if this will be the first time the people around me hear of this, or if they’ve suspected it all along.

Let me clarify, I was still me. There were days when I didn’t have to pretend to smile because it was real. Just because I took more comfort in ink than in voices doesn’t mean I was odd or broken. I am not broken. Still, I find it funny that a warm, living, breathing person couldn’t comfort me the way cold, dry, words could. Instead of seeking people, I sought the comfort of this old ratty couch from my brother’s house because it would never abandon me. It could not choose someone else over me and move away (although we did end up getting rid of it and I hope I haven’t damaged its self-esteem all that much).

I was alone in a state that seemed to refuse to accept me the way a vaccine is sometimes rejected by a body. I lost friends I thought I’d keep forever and people I’d known for years. Even sisters left me. So it was easy to convince myself that I was somehow to blame. But I am not. It’s funny how the negative thoughts are always the easiest to understand. They rationalize themselves. Those dark and twisted beliefs can’t be fought with a sword named Riptide or avoided with an invisibility baseball cap. But monsters can. So instead of falling in love with the people I saw around me, I fell in love with a character from a book. I turned my problems into monsters and I fell in love with the hero who helped me to slay them. It’s almost embarrassing how hard I wished for him to be real. To walk up to me and whisk me away physically the way the book did psychologically. I willed him to breathe. I willed him to find me. Sometimes, I still do and then I find myself disappointed because he never will. I’m grown now, not fully, not completely. I slip a lot but I’m trying. Give me time. They tell me a first love is always the hardest to forget.