What is Love?

Chapter 1 - Raven

"What is this?" I question as I open the long forgotten notebook in one of my reading desks. The decade old memories come alive with in me at once, as I run my hand across the countless pages of pictures and different styles of writing.

I once read from a paper that indifference is the downfall to our society. When I was reading that, I couldn't help but feel a spark within me. A realization, it is as if the answer to all of life's problems was just presented to me, but also at the same time the answer was impossible to comprehend. I also read once that hugs can cure any sadness no matter how devastating. I once saw a video on how that there are children on the other side of the world that do not even get a scrap of bread everyday and yet I get three square meals. And I once heard a mournful song about how a father leaving can bring the most destructive of acts to one's self.

When I was younger, I thought that the world was a cruel place. I was accursed with the downward spiral of depression and the inner turmoil that suicidal thoughts bring. My family was torn and poisoned at the start. I never knew of the word love in the sense of most people knew it. I was always surrounded by fighting, swearing, yelling, and throwing of things. I always thought it was there, I thought it was normal so I didn't question it. I never smiled before preschool. I never learned happiness. I was just empty.

So, when I first was sent to preschool I saw smiles for the first time. I experienced happiness for the first time in my life. I smiled for the first time ever. And I soon discovered something about myself. That my life it was not normal and I asked, why? Never to any living being but only in my mind. I asked, why was there no happiness in the house in which I live? Why was there no happiness in my parents' eyes when they looked at each other? Why was there no happiness in my mind? A five-year-old's mine should be filled with blissful ignorance, self-importance, and a loving nature. I was never quite like that. Sure, I was ignorant but I was never loving. I did not love. I wanted. I wanted everything that everyone else had. I was selfish in that sense because I did not have parents that love each other.

This was in the back of my mind so it did not bother me much until that day. All I remember is standing in the living room with my mother and father sitting on the couch and I was standing in front of them. I noticed that some bags are packed away, my father was near them. I had a sense, a feeling, I already knew something like this would happen one day. My parents told me they were getting a divorce, you would think I have cried but I did not shed a single tear. They did not even have to explain the word to me because, I already knew what it meant. They were going to be living away from each other. I was nine years old and I knew that word, a word that can destroy a childhood's hope of ever being normal.

Once they moved away from each other there was no more fighting, in reality it was kind of like a blessing almost. I never saw my parents before, but after I started to see their personalities their wants, their hopes, their ticks, and their dreams. I also realized that being who they are, they can never be together, in fact I never got why they were together the first place and I never knew why I existed. But my pain did not end there.

Even before my parents separated I was at the mercy of various students throughout my year's. 'Kids are cruel' they say and what they say is correct. Ignorant, self entitled, spoiled kids breeds indifference towards others and never compassion to each other. That is why indifference is dangerous, because that indifference can become hate and hate it became. I was at the mercy of it. Kids bully you for the simplest of things, if you have the colored crayon that they want or if you're sitting in their favorite seat. It seems innocent enough but, what happens when that starts to become name-calling, fighting, and isolation. I was called numerous things fat, small, a girl, a cry baby. They seem light but I've been called worse, that I rather not list, in fact I heard worst. When I go home I heard the most colorful and ugliest of words. If it was not the names it was the fighting, verbal fights and physical fights. Now me being a small young girl I would get beaten quite a lot and that happen, I was torn to pieces by the end. I cried a lot that's what I was called cry baby. I was called weak, a coward, and I should not belong in this world and that no one would care for someone like me if I was to die.