Cinderella's Diary

SEVENTEEN

SEVENTEEN

            I was a Disney baby. Fairytales were a part of me—even then, I always enjoyed sharing stories. I wasn’t a fast learner. Never the brainy type one. All there was in me was this hope, this yearning to one day—become the person I’m meant to be.

            Someone who told stories, I wanted to be a writer. When Kenshin Himura first came into my life in a form of a commercial, the excitement in me was palpable. His story was the greatest so far that I’ve known. My incessant love for books had only just begun. And I started reading books like there was no tomorrow. It was an escape for me. Books took me away from discrimination, ugliness, loneliness, aloneness and everything that I was. Memories stacked in the deep corners of the mind.

            “I will make it here in California,” I announced to my parents.

            This was the one thing I believed would make me happy. And receiving the grant letter was truly a dream come true. I took the exams in California Institute without expectation. Words were my comfort—my source of power, ego, and I would have loved nothing more than to write. But I took up arts. A sort of rebellion on my part if you will, for not being the kind of person people wanted me to be. Acceptance here in this international school was remarkably impossible. No matter what I did—or did not do. I didn’t fit in. My cousins said as much, that they were like that too once. They never experienced being stoned in the forehead. Only I inherited such fine luck.

            He rescued me in a day. I felt its effects grow much deeper. His was the face I wanted to use as my subject. With the final product, my “thank you” gift to him. He never came. Van was always absent. Despite this insatiable longing, I could never ask him. Never work up the nerve to at least talk to him—he and I were after all, two worlds apart.

            “Ella,” called Sandra “You’ve been so out of it in the last few days. Why don’t you just go talk to him?”

            I snickered, “Fat chance, the likes of him would converse with the likes of me.”

            “Now there’s some serious shit,” she commented “I thought you were over that?”

            “If you need me,” I said, standing abruptly “I’d be right over there.”

            There was a luscious open garden where I situated myself and my canvass. The flowers and trees bore me, whereas they used to be interesting subjects to illustrate. It was the boy’s face that drowned all other images. But at the same time—I was afraid I would only tarnish its “perfect beauty.” The student council president was by no means effeminate, his shoulders were broad at fifteen—he was extremely tall. The kind of guys, suckers like me fall for. I knew my place. And I wasn’t going in there. All I wanted was a masterpiece. His participation in my selfish goal of capturing a piece of him, a piece of any man I’ll never have.

            Often women are asked, what’s the essence of being a woman? What about the essence of being a man for a change? Was it the number of women he deflowered and fooled in a certain time frame? The cars he drove? The clothes he wore? The manner in which he carried his unmistakable strength for everyone to see, and I believed, if I could understand that. I’d probably unlock the secret to being wanted, at least as a friend.