Some girls are afraid of the dark. I was afraid of something far worse. I was afraid of being loved.My name is Jasmine, and I want to tell you something that took me a long time to admit I have always wanted love,Deeply,Quietly. The kind of love that makes you feel safe inside your own skin. But wanting something and allowing yourself to have it are two completely different things, and for as long as I can remember, I chose wanting over having. I chose the longing over the risk.I was raised on warnings. Not bedtime stories, not lullabies warnings. My parents, God bless them, loved me in the only way they knew how. And the way they knew how was to protect me From boys,from men,From anything that wore a smile and carried sweet words like weapons."Men will stain your white," my mother used to say.I was young when I first heard those words. Too young to fully understand them. But I was old enough to feel their weight settle into my chest like a stone. And as I grew, that stone grew with me. It did not hurt exactly. It just sat there heavy, quiet, certain. Reminding me every time a boy smiled in my direction, every time a classmate giggled about a crush, every time love showed up anywhere near me.Stay back,Stay safe,Stay clean.So I built my walls. Not overnight walls like mine are never built overnight. They go up brick by brick, year by year, every time you watch someone you love cry over a person who was supposed to love them back. Every warning. Every whispered conversation between aunties. Every woman who walked into a room carrying a pain she did not deserve. I watched all of it and I took notes, even when I did not know I was taking notes.By the time I was Nighteen, my walls were so high and so perfectly built that even I had forgotten what it felt like to be warm inside them. I was not cold exactly. I was just contained. Organized,Safe,and I told myself that i was enough.I got my admission into college that year. Medicine and Surgery my dream, my purpose, the one thing I had chosen to give my whole heart to without fear. I remember the day the news came. I screamed,i cried,Not the kind of crying that comes from sadness, but the kind that bursts out of you when something you worked for so hard finally becomes real.I did it. I actually did it.College was my fresh start, my clean page. I made myself a promise the night before my first day. No distractions,no detours,no boys. I was going to wake up early, attend every class, sit in the front row, and become everything my parents sacrificed for me to become.And for those first few days, that is exactly what I did.I woke up at four every morning while my roommates were still breathing in their sleep. I packed my bag quietly in the dark, made it to the lecture hall before almost anyone else, and sat close enough to the front that I could hear every single word my lecturers said. I was focused, I was disciplined.I was also, if I am being completely honest, a little bit lonely.College was noisier than I expected. Fuller. Everyone seemed to already know someone. Girls moved in groups, laughing at things I was not close enough to hear. Boys called out to each other across the corridor with a comfort and familiarity I envied quietly. I told myself I did not need that. I told myself I had come here for one reason.But the truth is ,and this is the part I did not admit to myself until much later I had dreamed about college being more than just studying. I had imagined freedom,and fun.
The version of myself that could finally breathe outside of all those warnings.That version of me never showed up in those first weeks.Instead, I went to class. I went back to my room. I read my notes until my eyes burned. And I stacked another brick on top of my already very tall, very quiet, very lonely wall.I did not know yet that something was coming,someone was coming,And he was not going to knock.