The Brain Is In The Head

I was in third year in college when I met Len* She was younger than me by two years. A product of broken family and raised by her adoptive parents, Len was somehow bitter. She always finds something wrong about anybody, me included of course, but since I learned not to mind criticisms, I just let it pass. But others were not as tolerant as I was, they found Len bitchy unfriendly.

If there was one person I knew Len sincerely cared about, it was her childhood friend Mark. But life seemed to be unfair, Mark’s parents did not approve of Len. Len became even more bitter and said things about Mark’s parents that were not nice. When Mark learned about them, he kept his distance. Consequently, Len  lost Mark as a friend.

Hurt and mad, Len diverted all of her attention to someone she barely knew. She spent the night with the guy and gave herself to him, hoping the guy will love her for what she did. She was wrong, the guy did not find anything special about what she did. After all, they liked each other even though they just met. When the guy left to go home in the province, she never heard of him again.

One night, as Len was headed home, a group of guys invited her to share a drink with them. She found it nice for them to invite her, so she joined them. But in her second bottle of beer, she found one of the guys starting to touch her in a lascivious way. She got up and left. They yelled at her calling her names she didn’t know she would hear.

The following day, she told me about it in a detached manner. I told her she was lucky she was not gang-raped. Then she broke down. She cried and cried asking me why people find it difficult to love her and why is it that she is not happy like other people.

At that time, I didn’t know what to say. I just said that love begets love and that she had to love other people so they will love her back. Then she said why is it that she always loved the wrong person, to this I answered maybe the reason why the brain is in the head is so that it will tell the heart what to do and that she had to use her brain more so that she will commit less mistake in choosing whom to love.

Unwise and young as I was back then, I thought it was the most sensible thing I could say to her.

*not real name