Fairy Tale Abroad

I am 23 now and a lot has changed; that’s why I am writing in this journal, hoping that what I put down, somehow, the pain I feel stays on these pages rather than my heart.

Every story has a beginning; mine starts as every other girls does with a fairytale, a hope that I will one day be as accomplished as a princess but also have my knight in shining armour, but then reality strikes and you aren’t prepared for the truth.

Until I moved to the UK I didn’t realise I was genuinely living in a fairytale. It was a fairytale abroad in China, but that is a story for another time. Coming to this country scared me. I was leaving the people who made me feel at home, that gave me purpose; but I felt at ease knowing I would be in a small village similar to my last home—but I was wrong. Life at first was hard for my parents because of the constant moving, they struggled to find the right education for us, especially me, but I was always a challenge. A lot of my life felt like I was such a burden to my family, I always struggled to stick to anything and always had an attitude. I did always achieve to be more but somehow ended up with less.

When I arrived in Bishops Stortford, I was 16 years old, a confused girl who just wanted to fit in. I went from phase to phase, met boy after boy to only find out what true evil was. I found this in Cambridge. I met a boy who manipulated me for his own gain; that was my first foot down the wrong path. What life doesn’t prepare you for is one person can shatter your innocence in a blink of an eye but a las I found that out the hard way.

No one can truly prepare you for the day you loose apart of your soul in one night. All parents can do is shield you from the upsetting truth of life, but mine where still blinded by our perfect fairytale life to have fathomed what was going to happen to me.

Even now I am struggling to write the words, but here we go: At 17, I lost my virginity to rape, and I will never get that special moment back. My rape unfortunately felt like a premeditated act to get the new girl out of Cambridge. It was orchestrated by three people. I was drugged first by a female classmate, and then taken home by two of my male class mates and the rest well the rest you know. That day still haunts me like a bad day, and I carry it on my heart like a smudge that you can’t wipe away, as if I am incapable of feeling clean never to be pure again.

One day started off a chain of events in my life that has made the smudge bigger and the body more corrupt. At the age of 18 life began looking up; a boy from my past just moved to London. He was a musician hoping to leave his mark in the UK and find his sound. Meeting him was the first time I ever understood love. He was kind and caring and always thought of me, no matter what he did, but he was also a lot like me: Lost and hurt by pain that I only grew to know later on. Him and I always took the opportunity to explore London as it was alien to both of us; we went to many places and went to many bars we wanted to take in as much English culture as possible, just as we did in China. We ended up stumbling into what we called “our place” which was Camden Town, I remember this old dodgy bar we found in the market place, there was shisha and a pool table. We would sit there for hours smoking weed, smoking shisha, and drinking nonstop. It was as if we where both trying to numb the same sort of pain. The both of us never spoke of our problems to each other it was like the wound was way to fresh so we only spoke of the good old days and partied trying to hide the real issues. My luck grew; that year I made another friend at my new college in Ware. She was just like me. We where inseparable; it was like she was my long lost sister and I have never loved someone as much as I love her. My twin was better than me in many ways—she was smarter and more sensible, but she partied as hard as I did. Me and her did many things together; we smoked weed, we took ridiculous amounts of drugs, and went to every party you could think of, but then as all parties do, it all ended. My twin fell in love and it was like there was no more room left for me in her life. Even though that wasn’t true, it is how I treated it, and we grew apart. If there was ever a chance I could tell her how sorry I was, or how much I loved her, I would, but unfortunately I have always been that much of a coward.