Courting Acceptance

It's been ten years of silent pains and what ifs. Ten years of trying to convince her self into letting go. Ten years of guilt that was had been gradually eating her alive. She knew she didn't have anyone to blame but herself. After all, she had thought she was doing her a great favour by giving her the life she had always envied the girls who she'd always spied behind the towering brick wall in the part of town where she had first viewed how life was so different from the one she had always known.

Abigail was her given name but she had always preferred to be called Abby because as she had always thought, it gave her a certain 'air' that almost matched that of the girls whom she usually saw getting into the shiny big cars in their pristine uniforms to be driven to school by their fathers or those stay-at- home moms who lived their lives through their husbands. Everything about them revolved around their family and those dumb clubs they thought made them look important. At 12, Abby already had developed a well honed ability to read people from afar considering how she'd always fend for herself for the better half of those years. She would always say to herself..'it's either play or be played Abby..you have nobody but yourself'

Growing up on the streets as result of a nameless and never before seen father with an absentee mother in tow, had left a gaping hole that had slowly replaced her heart, leaving it hollow. She was never good at being one to paint flowers and smileys, She had known she was different from a lot of girls her age when she was not quite eight. And since then, she'd never deluded herself of being otherwise.

Seventeen, the most exciting time of every teenagers existence. Life, some who had everything going right for them would say, began at this odd number. For Abby being seventeen and not knowing where she belonged in this not quite understood thing called 'life' had never been more of a mystery to her. While those her age were living the 'dream' at seventeen..Abby needed direction in an otherwise misguided existence.

Life couldn't have been more cruel when she almost gave up on everything after being molested by equally misguided teenagers the only difference..they didn't want out. Battered and shattered had never become so meaningful right until Abby's gruesome ordeal. Left to die in a pool of mud mixed with blood, Abby thought she would finally be free. Free of every shackle that had defined her sorry existence till now. But fate had a different thought all together.

That night was a defining moment for Abby who had prayed for death and was cheated out of it. Fast-forward eight months after the hateful experience, a baby girl, the product of what happened that night and the emergence of a new Abby.

Now, standing looking at the well polished mahogany door, she thought to herself .'I may be too late' It's been ten years since she'd agreed to leave her baby girl with Mr. and Mrs Caleb, who had been waiting upon the good lord for a child. Ten years since she'd never looked back on her way to rewriting her own story with a pen customized with her name on it. Now ten years later, after hitting it big in the business world and changing an image that had seem to shadow her every move ...she realised she wanted her daughter back.