Thoughts

October's Very Own: The Childhood.

A/N: Hello wonderful readers. I have decided to start a small series of thoughts under the title 'October's Very Own'. I don't have a specific schedule that I need to fill... but the series must end before October does... obviously. Ok, this is the last authors not I will put up for the next couple of chapters so as usual, thank you for reading and let me know what you think about it :)

Wednesday, 10 October 2018. 05:47pm.

I love my life.

More accurately, I love the ease of my life.

I know what you are thinking. Such a self absorbed girl who knows nothing about life in the least bit.

Well, you got one out three right.

I am as guilty as they come on the self absorbed part. But I am defiantly not uneducated on the ways of life, thank you very much.

Oh, yes... and I am not a girl.

At least, that was a long time ago.

A really, really, really long time ago.

Lucinda is the name my darling of a father named me just before I was abandoned on the steps of Hills Orphanage. My mother... well I never did uncover much about the life Lily Bioni lived. There isn't much you can find on a woman who only lived till the ripe age of sixteen years.

But they are the reason I love my life. It might seem twisted to you. It certainly did seem that way to me when I was six years old. My mother, I can forgive. She is not on this earth to take responsibility for her seed.

But my father... what possible reason could he have had to leave me at the hands of Sister Mary who constantly pinched my cheeks just for asking questions she considered irrelevant of an orphaned child?

None.

There was no reason that could supplement the fact that my father left me. I found him years later. He didn't even recognize me as he came looking for employment. Then again, how could he? I was an exact duplicate of his shameful face and he had already decided long ago that he was an inexcusable waste of space in this reality. His hate for himself tainted his love for any reality that his estranged daughter could resemble him. I wonder if that was what killed him.

I mourned him the way a daughter would a father. I did not love him. Not even in a way a human does to another. I merely accepted the biological link we shared. And I went to his grave to give him my thanks for his likeness.

His image might have been shameful, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

I have written too much about this man. This was not supposed to be about my father's failings. That could fill an entire book with no help.

This is a story about my life.

I was adopted by a woman named Edna who had never had the comfort of a child and was never likely to experience it from her womb. She had recently been widowed by the fire of a hotel somewhere in London. The inferno had been a huge spectacle and it had left Edna without a husband in her house and a personal assistant in her company.

A small price to pay, Edna would say many years later as she renovated the entire east wing of The Grand Consummate Hotel for no charge at all by the owner.

Again, that is not the story I had planned to write.

My story truly begins three years after Edna had taken me into her mansion and assigned me a certain kind of lifestyle many would call extreme.

The story is so long... and some parts of it are long buried in the layers of brain cancer. I wonder how much I can remember...

Let me begin by describing Edna's relationship with me. Yes... that is the best place to being.

Edna was not such a lovable person to be around. I was just a child and I already understood that. She was incapable of reciprocating any emotion she was shown. Mostly it meant she was unable to love me in any form, even to the bare minimum of being seen as caring.

I picked this up on the little things she did during my first few years with her.

For instance, she detested the name Lucinda to no limit and changed it as soon as I officially belonged to her. I had to copy my new name on a piece of paper no less than a hundred times, every day for two years, until Edna was satisfied I would never forget the spelling for "Eleanor" in whichever corner of the earth I ventured.

Her reason for this was not cruel.

I named myself Lucinda in her friends' company not twenty four hours since I arrived in her mansion.

Completely justified considering Edna's nature.

I remember one time I came back home sporting a mysterious wound that only the mysterious life of a child could provide. Her sympathy extended to the point of telling the maids to make sure I did not track blood onto the marble floor.

She once fired one of our multitudes of house helps for the crime of being unfashionable in the uniform that Edna herself had created. When the woman pleaded with my mother for a second chance, she was rewarded with about four years of her salary and given twenty four hours to vacate the premises before she was thrown out.

That was the woman I was raised by.

Away from that... we fast forward to my first day in Secondary school.

Edna had refused to take me to primary first since I was already late on the admission age. She did not believe in associating failure to the Grandeur name so she chose to sample the space in between my head and see how deep my pool of knowledge could reach.

I would always say a small prayer of thanks for the fact that my well of intellect was not shallow. It however, needed filling with proper tutelage and Edna required only two years to bring me up to speed with everything and anything a nine year old needed to know.

She probably added more to the curriculum than necessary. I wouldn't have guessed it at the time, but I realized the periodic table is not a prerequisite for a nine year old to have memorized in her head.

Even with all her demanding nature, I made it my life's mission to please Edna in any way I could. She had rescued me from the hell that is being an orphan. Bathed me in money and clothed me in knowledge. She might have not been the most lovable person on earth.

But she was the most lovable person in my life.

I wonder if I did enough. Was I fulfilling the roles of a child to their mother, no matter the extent of their biological relations?

I doubt it.

Edna was never happy at all. She had gone to Hills Orphanage to find love and comfort. An escape from the harsh reality of this world and all its unfaithful aspects. It would have even been enough to even find comfort.

Instead she found a very obedient girl that she just did not know how to hold hands with when the pain become too much to bare alone.