Luna and the Lie

by Mariana Zapata

All I had ever wanted was to be loved.

“You kill me, girl,” he murmured in the roughest voice I’d ever heard. “I swear to God, you’re a fucking puzzle I thought was all in the box, but every damn day I find a piece or two hidden all over the place.”

Everyone deserves love, but there are people that don’t want it, no matter how desperately and truly you might give it to them.

I’d stopped pining for people who didn’t treat me as well as I treated them as a kid. I had promised myself back then that I would never fall for that crap again, and in a life where I had failed myself a dozen times, that one oath had been the only one I managed to uphold.

I’m not going to give and give and give to someone who doesn’t want what I have to share. My parents have done it to me, my siblings have done it to me, everyone does it to me when I let them, and you’re going to be the last person who makes me feel like a freaking nuisance.

You gave me these pieces of you I know you haven’t given to anybody else, and they’re mine. You can’t take ’em back. I need them more than you do, you hear me?”

The funny thing about life is that there’s a lot you don’t get to choose. You don’t get to choose whom you’re related to. You don’t get to choose your hair color, your height, or what natural talents you are given. You don’t get to choose where you are born, or who or what the world will see when they look at you. But the best part of life is that in the end, none of that matters. You get to choose who you become. Who you love. You can change your hair color and, to an extent, you can even change your eye color and height. You can learn to be great at something.