My Face My Story

My story began at the age of 17.

I fell in love, without anyone's permission, a selfless act of freedom and a need to find out why I couldn't be like the heroines in films.

I was hearing the violins, I was hearing the leaves fall and birds singing and I was finishing my GCSE'S. I was introduced to a guy walking up to me during recess, a guy who, to say the least, came up to the fences at my high school and thought we could make something of anything. He wasn't great at making conversation, and we couldn't exactly shake hands, so we just swapped numbers and that was it.

I was studying in college with him. He went everywhere I went too, and we were the best friends we had never had for each other, and I caused my mother hell. She caught us many times together, I skipped lunch break at school with him in the summertime, and she knew I was not going to let go of him. I didn't have a mobile phone at 16 or 17, so I use to lie to my mother by saying that I needed it for an alarm clock to wake me up in the mornings, but I would really give him a set time to call the mobile phone and we would talk until we fell asleep on the phone.

There was a time when he was getting kinda worried about me doing all this cautionary stuff at home knowing I would get caught one day. So he brought me a phone with his first wages, and it was the best phone I ever had: a Sony Ericsson slide that had lights.

He smoked, he had acne, and he was wearing American-style clothes with a cap. Everyone had a boyfriend. Time went on, not years, time, and we were there for each other; college, new employment, and I had met his family on many occasions, especially when I got employed as a pediatric nursing assistant at 18 in the hospital.

I changed him during the three years we were going on strong together; he stopped smoking, he lost weight, he got a job, he was eating healthy and he was committed to me. He was like my security guard because he always dropped me off at home, waited until I got inside and looked out the window to tell him there is no trouble, or he would be waiting at the corner of my road for me to come out and we could go to college together or go for a day out... but the whole family war ended when I was 18. That is another chapter of my life. So, further on, we grew together because we were each other's first lovers, and that was special to us because we promised we would get married and have kids. Our whole future was planned on his family accepting me, but my parents were a problem.

Then my parents found out. Well that is how I felt at the time, and it was like the Capulets and Montagues: it was never ever going to happen. I was not allowed to marry him. I lost my virginity to him; I thought it would make a pact and my parents wouldn't say no or reject the idea of me being with someone who I willingly loved and planned the rest of my life with at the age of 17.

I become a failure, a burden. Everything deteriorated right in front of me. I lost everything.