A Self-love Story

Chapter 1

Don't ever put your happiness in someone else's hands. They'll drop it. They'll drop it every time.

Dear Diary,

In the past week, everything in my life has gone to hell. I'm a mess, actually, that is an understatement, I'm an utter wreck, a disaster. Okay, since you have no clue what I'm talking about I'll backtrack a little and explain everything. I'll start where most stories start, the moment that changed everything.

It was a beautiful day with beautiful weather. The sky was a pastel blue, like the perfect skies described in a fairytale with the sun's warmth and light, soft on my skin. The wind was racing nearly as fast as the car as I had been sitting in. It blew over my cheeks and made them flush and tingle with the chill and wove its icy fingers through my hair. My laugh and Theo's danced in the air, rising above the noise of the car and the wind, not seeming even the slightest bit like a cacophony. No, it sounded like a sweet melody. Like the sweet song a siren sings before she lures in and kills her prey. A song that precedes a disaster, but I didn't know that then.

Then as fast as the car had raced through the road, disaster ensued. The car crashed into another car and glass pieces rained down the air. Actually, rained down isn't an apt description. The glass pieces pelted down upon us like hail. They weren't heavy, but they made up for it by being deadly sharp. In the chaos, I saw bright lights and heard high pitched sirens mingling with terrified screams. I saw bright red as my skin bled and bled and bled and heard my own moans of pain as if I were floating somewhere above my body. I remember seeing my arms tremble and my feet tremble. My the world around me spun and then narrowed and dwindled until there was nothing but dark.

Then, I awoke hours later or maybe even days, seeing my family and friends gathered all around me, looking at me with concern and relief etched in their faces. Some even had smears of pity in their expressions. I realised that I was in a hospital, and somewhere in the back of my memory I recollected the accident I had just been in. My entire body ached, but it was now only a dull kind of ache, one that I could thankfully bear.

I had tried to get off the bed and the nurse rushed to my side to help me. When I looked at my reflection in the mirror, I did a double take. The girl in the reflection looked nothing like me. Her face and arms were covered in scars, her hair was chopped off unevenly and there were twin smudges of purple underneath her eyes. She wasn't me, because...she wasn't beautiful. Then as the realisation hit, slow tears began to leak out of my eyes. I wasn't beautiful anymore. I know that that shouldn't have affected me so much, but it did. I didn't want to be so superficial and shallow but beauty had always just been a part of me. I'd always been beautiful and then I wasn't. The suddenness of it all was overwhelming. I was ashamed of it, of my fear of not being beautiful. And even though I knew that internal beauty was more important than external beauty, I couldn't come just be okay with what had happened. Knowledge and belief are worlds apart.

Then the next disaster happened when Theo broke up with me only compounding my belief that beauty was needed to be loved. I cried and begged him not to, but he went through with it, smiling sadly at me. When I asked him why the answer broke my heart. It shattered not only my heart but also my confidence along with it.

"You're just different now, I'm sorry Tia. I'm so sorry," He had said calmly, not realising the deep damage that those few words had done to me. Because I knew that 'different' just meant ugly. I wondered for days after that and am still wondering, did he apologise because he was sorry he was breaking up with me or because he was sorry that I wasn't beautiful anymore? And was that all he saw in me?

I had cried myself to sleep that night, my tears moistening the pillow as the moon gleamed in the night and the stars sparkled. I had cried even harder then, thinking to myself, how dare the moon glow and the stars shine as I cry? How dare everyone be happy when I'm not? How dare Theo break up with me?  But I knew that it was my fault. If I wasn't so scarred now, so ugly, then he wouldn't have broken up with me. No, no, I can't think like that, but in the end, I couldn't help it because if that wasn't the reason, then the real reason was that he didn't think the inside of me was beautiful enough and at that time, the thought was unbearable.