Abercrombie

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Danielle Tiffany Abercrombie. She got her name after a famous designer called David Thomas Abercrombie, one of the producers of Abercrombie & Fitch. She grew up in Crested Butte, Colorado, a very secluded and icy cold area. She was a poet, someone who looked up to ambiguous and controversial things. She was a parsimonious altruist, a writer, and a lesbian. She was 21 years old at that time, at an age where people usually already know what they are going to do in life right after graduation from a university they hand-picked by themselves. She was at an age where people didn’t have to mind who they are, because it was just being them. It’s who they are. And they might as well have to accept themselves or kill themselves.

But Danielle found it difficult for her to do both. All her life, ever since she knew about her ‘peculiarity’ of liking the same sex, she wanted to change. She wanted to cut the so-called ‘social deviation’ out of her veins. She just wanted to be like any other girl who likes guys in her Elementary or High School or even campus. She wanted to be like everybody else who God created so perfectly, with no flaw. Why did He create her with that sort of struggle in her life? Why couldn’t He have made her like everybody else?

“To be or not to be? That is the question.”

Hamlet’s famous words from Shakespeare’s “The Tragedie of Hamlet – Prince of Denmarke” was Danielle’s only motto in life. And he was right. She was stuck going to and fro about life and death. Hamlet and her had the same thinking. Maybe life right now is hard, but what if death is harder? What if by her committing suicide, she will get something far worse? And when she regrets it, she certainly can’t come back to life. That’s all she thought of in her being.

She felt like a zombie. A zombie walking in a void. That’s how she felt so deeply; hollow and empty. The obsessive need to change was exhausting. And the pressure from her family and friends and community was not helping at all. They kept telling her to move forward, meaning they wanted her to ‘click back’ into the little girl they used to know and take care of and love. But what they didn’t know was she had been that way all her life.

At the age of 15, she had already told her close friend Amery and both her parents. She thought that her closest people in the world would understand and accept her the way she was and still treated her the same. But she was absolutely wrong. When she told Amery, her eyes and mouth popped opened and she said, “Are you crazy?!” When she told her mom, she closed her eyes and teard began to fall. When she told her dad, he stood abruptly and threw his hand to her face. Things did not end very well.

She moved to Manhattan, New York at 23 because she couldn’t take it any longer. She moved to a place where she could be her complete self, taking off her mask she had been wearing for many, many years. Well, she lived alone. Who should she impress?

This is just something I felt like writing. I know it’s a bit of a cliff-hanger, but I don’t know what else to write next. I will update it when I’ve come up of something. But until then, I’ll stop here. Thank you so much for reading.