Tragedy ✔️

Chapter One ( Part One )

Chapter One, Part One: Unlovable
Sophia Crawford

When I was in fourth grade, my English teacher asked our class what they thought love felt like to them. It seemed like a simple question at the time.

Some of their answers were pretty silly when I think back on them, like Samantha who said that love felt like getting licked in the face by a puppy and Al who said that love felt like getting kissed on the cheek by Grandma.

But there was a specific answer that really got to me mainly because I didn’t have that kind of love, and to this day I don’t think I would ever have that love, either. Daniel Oakley answered that love felt like mom’s warm hugs.

The answer got to me because I didn’t have a mom who pulled me into a warm hug whenever I was sad, like Daniel said. When I cried, she told me to suck it up. She didn’t hug me. She didn’t comfort me. She didn’t show me any affection, or even love. I never felt her love, and it felt like her love was supposed to be the most important, seeing that she’s my mother and all.

Therefore I thought I was incapable of feeling love, until I met him.

Daniel Oakley.

I know it’s a different kind of love, but it’s the only love I have ever and truly known. It was a love very different from getting licked in the face by a puppy or getting a cheek-kiss by Grandma, but it’s a love I will never forget.

Daniel showed me what love felt like and if I could hold onto that feeling forever, I would, but I lost him in a terrible car accident and the love I tried to hold onto slipped right through my fingertips. I lost the only person who has ever showed me how love truly felt like and now I don’t think I can ever feel something like that ever again, especially since I was the one who caused his death, because who wants to love a person who killed someone?

My mother, who never loved me before, wanted a reason to throw me out of the house and when she found out that I killed Daniel in that accident, she did, she threw me out. She sent me, along with a few bags of my belongings, straight to my grandmother’s house. I don’t think she has ever thought about me since, and to be honest, I don’t really even care.

I never knew what it felt like to be loved by her, so it wasn’t a big loss. I can’t say that it didn’t bother me, though, because it did. It’s not very pleasant to know that the person who birthed you doesn’t love you at all.

All my life I thought that the problem was me, until I realised I wasn’t.

She was.

My mother.

She was the problem.

My mother wanted every single thing to be completely perfect and nothing should’ve been out of place. “Nothing less of perfect.” She’d say. And when she realised that I didn’t want to wear my hair perfectly like she did, or go shopping with her when I could have spent the day outside, she ruled me out to be imperfect—something she didn’t want her only daughter to be.