Chapter Nine – Moving To The City

After high school I had to move to the city to stay with my mom, my stepdad and two little brothers. I needed to further my studies. I had to say goodbye to the rural life and hello to the city one.

Honestly I had no idea what to expect. The city was huge compared to where I came from and here you were even lucky if you knew your neighbors. People had the biggest fences around their houses, I wondered if they were protecting themselves from criminals or from their neighbors.

My mother enrolled me in a college and I was looking forward to starting a new life in a new place where I had no dark past tied to it. It was literally starting on a clean slate.

Living in the city was the biggest change ever for me. Both in a good and a bad way. It meant I was closer to the scumbags or to places where the killings and the raping of homosexual women were happening compared to being back at home. So being there meant my chances if being a victim just multiplied.

I lived though and I went to college. I made some new amazing friends. People who again loved me for who I am. These friends were so great that they helped me pick girls and told me if they weren’t pretty enough for me.

I remember this one time when one girl in our class told me I was pretty, and she liked me. I wasn’t attracted to her, so I had to turn her down, unfortunately. But telling my friends about that encounter was the biggest mistake ever, because they made fun of the situation so much, even today when we think about that girl, they still laugh at me about it.

I wouldn’t change them for anything though, because they made me feel like I could be myself and I felt safer with them all the time. They always had my back.

When I went back to my new home I wouldn’t say anything though. I was still hiding and since my mother heard I had a boyfriend when I was 15, she didn’t pry. But things were different now, 18-year-old me was fully sure that she wasn’t attracted to men at all. I was scared of telling my mother though. That made me sad a little because it drove this little wedge between us.

Since I was scared of talking to my mom because I didn’t know how her reaction would be, I created a blog online and wrote. On my blog I’d write stories about someone who is lost and trying to find their identity or about a girl who was madly in love with another girl and no one cared.

Most stories I wrote were a fantasy, something I wished I was living. A world where everyone could be whatever they wanted, where no one was killed for who they are or who they love. A little world I would escape to when I felt like everything in the real world was too much or too scary. It was my little happy place. Little did I know that sooner, I’ll meet someone who’ll make me experience something I never knew existed. Love.