The Girl With the Falsa

Home was where I learned to disappear. Not because I wanted to, but because being a girl was treated like a diagnosis nobody could cure. Pity lived in the hallway and damn guilt sat at the dinner table. Fights filled the silence between them. My home became my prison, and I served my sentence quietly, waiting for the one place that let me out.

School was that place for me. Not all of it though, just the rooms with numbers and equations, where nobody cared what I was, only what I could solve. My music, my oxygen.

It started with Mrs M. at elementary school and then middle school, same steady hands guiding me through the same steady subject. Mathematics didn't ask if I was a girl. Maths asked if I understood, and I did. Every equation was a door that opened the same way for everyone, and for the first time, I walked through one without permission.

Then came high school, and Mr. P's physics lab. I was fourteen, the only girl in that room. There was this one time, I remember vividly, the boys had clustered around a table, trying to build a seesaw to prove static and dynamic balance, the kind of experiment that looks simple until you're the one holding the ruler and the theory won't cooperate. They were struggling, adjusting, arguing. While I, on the other hand, was looking at them with a sly smile, as if I had already found a solution, my way.

I had falsa in my bag. Small, round, purple, fruits from home, of all things, now doing physics homework. I placed them on the table's surface first, one by one, watching to see if the base itself was balanced before I built anything on top of it. Testing the foundation before you trust the structure. Nobody taught me that. I just knew.

Mr. P noticed it. He didn't laugh, didn't redirect me back to the normal way. He watched a girl solve a physics problem with fruit and told me to keep going. Be different, he said. Not despite it, but because of it.

That sentence undid years of being told I was cursed.

In that lab, my brain cells could finally breathe. Free periods weren't free time, they were mine, spent among beakers and levers and the quiet permission to think without apologizing for it. The workshop didn't care that I was a girl. It only cared that I was curious, and curiosity, it turned out, was the one thing nobody at home could take from me.

Mrs. M gave me the language and Mr. P gave me the room. Between the two of them, they built something my house never could, proof that I wasn't broken. I was just balancing, testing my own foundation, one falsa at a time, until I trusted what I was standing on.

That was my Cheeky way of finding my love language. Physics, numbers, logic — became my Dame Amore.