Trauma [H.S]

1

Valeria Chambers

The minute I stepped through the huge doors of Oxford University, the air shifted and I felt a shiver run down my spine.

I could feel all eyes on me, staring at the intruder I am from another country, like I didn't even belong here.

But how would they know? They didn't even know my name.

Maybe because I wasn't blonde or had blue eyes or a body of a model. People would look at me and jump into conclusions that I was not one of them.

Isn't that what everyone thinks?

I looked like a Middle Eastern girl who was trying to blend in with the English culture, wearing an oversized hoodie with some ripped denim.

Which was what I was trying to do.

Blending in.

And I was ninety nine percent a Middle Eastern girl, with one percent spice of English. A mix of both.

With an English name.

Valeria Chambers.

My father was from England, and my mother was from Syria. I got my father's last name but lived my whole life in Syria, except for the first few years of my exsistence.

I was a spitting image of my mother who had Middle Eastern features; as in elevated, thick eyebrows, almond-shaped brown eyes, straight nose with a little bump at the end, full cheeks, full lips, well-defined jawline, prominent chin, white skin, and long brown straight hair.

If I had a penny for every time anyone asked if I was her daughter just by looking at us, I'd be a millionaire by now.

My father went into a coma because of a car accident when he was going to his work and I never saw him again, so my mum couldn't afford living in the UK anymore to put food on the table and afford daily necessities because she worked in a nursery and the money wasn't enough, so we came back to Syria and put him in a free hospital until he wakes again. I was only ten when it happened.

I wasn't aware of what was happening when I moved back, and I didn't know how I used to live in the UK simply because my mum raised me the same way she was raised in Syria.

I had no friends during the first few years of my life in England because everyone thought I was a freak, but the truth was that I was only following the culture of another country as best as I could.

I also never had a boyfriend or a boy as a friend at all. Not that I know of. I didn't know how to talk to them because I didn't have any masculine figures around me to know what they were like.

But having no father figure around or a brother didn't help, especially when I used to go to a girls only school. There were plenty of other normal schools who had both genders, but guess what, those were private schools, and of course my mum couldn't afford them.

I've always wanted to go on dates like in the movies, but I never dated because my mum always told me that if I wanted to date then it had to end with marriage, dating without getting married at the end just ends with heartbreak. And I didn't even know anyone to have a crush on in the first place, just the ones I knew from when I was ten back in England who I don't even remember.

She also said that those TV shows and movies only showed you what they wanted you to see, not the problems that happened and the complications that came from a simple action like dating a guy.

I didn't blame her. She was just trying to protect me. So I believed her, because I didn't know who else to believe.

That was why it was easy for me to make friends at school when I came back to Syria.  Life there was just...simple, but yet so complicated at the same time.