If you want me to continue signify your interest.
Criticism, encouragement, jokes, correction, observations are allowed in her.

I will edit THIS SPACE fir chapter 2.

(stay close)

"Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses"
CHAPTER 1

In The beginning, she had always held in self-conceited disdain those who had gone head over heels in love, women especially. She would intone In an overweening expression:
" To lose a sense of dignity and become confined to feelings is animalisation. That isn't love, otherwise, it wouldn't be God."
Once she told an older woman, her mother, what she thought love is.
" When the mind sees the one to attach its body, it doesn't lose its rationality. Infact, emotions become unnecessary"

Tade was born nineteen years ago into an affluent home of Reverend Charles. As the only girl among three, one would expect indulgence lavished upon her. But Rev. Charles ruined any trace of such she noticed in Mrs Charles. She wasn't spared of house chores nor was she excused from disciplines when incurred.
Tade was brought up in the fear of the lord. But it was difficult to say which made such a seemingly perfect lady today; her father's moral strictness or high religious demands. Her father saw in her a divine bequest, whose lifestyle would depict Godliness and decency.
Rev Charles hate for amoral ladies was implacable. Once she paused abruptly in the middle of his long sermon, walked to a lady and rebuked her for sitting with her legs wide open " like the gate of hell'. The church exploded in laughter. On another occasion he chided a lady for her blouse that revealed her cleavage. Many atimes had he condemned indecent dressing and he once went to the extreme by asking Virgins to signify their presence.
His children were role models in the neighborhood.
It is therefore less surprising that a lady could be so full of herself that she berates ladies who fall below her standard. People say she's only a girl but a replica of her father.

But that was then.

Tade was feeling bad today. How else could she put it? Why should the sight of a guy make her lose composure like that? She has been battling to keep his thought off her mind but it stuck still. It made her feel somehow elated but also sad as though she had lost a treasure. Unable to keep it No more, she told her mother.

" There's this boy in church that makes me feel uneasy"
" What's his name? "
"Dunno. He's new. I guess"
"Are you afraid of him or what? "
"Dunno, I just lose composure when he's around and he appears gentle and cool"

her mother sighed

"Mum, this is strange. When you are afraid of one who can't hurt you. And that type of fear draws u closer to him. Even when u try to avoid him."

her mother sighed again

"I did something stupid yesterday, I sat in church for two hours just to say hi to him but when the time came I became nervous and avoided him.
" she hesitated before asking: " Mum have you ever felt like this before? "

"I wonder why you take fickle feelings this important. I''ve had millions feelings all my life. Don't take ur feelings too seriously."
But there was something of mother's words that was more concealed than she hid. And Tade saw through it.

" I will tell daddy about this.. "

"You said what? "
Mother almost screamed. Mrs Charles thought for a while if it wasn't inappropriate for a Mother to discuss such a topic with daughter. But Fade was eighteen almost nineteen.At that age, Some girls already were abortion expert while hers was so naive that she couldn't even know that her feelings was attraction. Mrs Charles felt at first an achievement that her Tade is uncorrupted by the prevalence decadence, then somehow she was ashamed that her daughter was unprepared for the unavoidable. That was her failure, she admitted.

"You are attracted to him..." she forced it out.

Tade felt so embarrassed that for the first time she was shy before her mother. She didn't know how to take it.

"I'm not.... it's just that ther's something about him that I dont see in most guys"

" Really? And what's that?"
Mother asked cynically. She was becoming impatient about the whole issue. But she knew better than break the friendship she's built with her daughter. Somehow she enjoyed her daughter's openness with her.

" mum, that's the problem" she burst out, almost weeping. '"I don't know why I think he's different; this is torment".
Tears ran down her smooth cheek.
This is the tears of a woman whose conviction clashed with emotions.
Tears of a lady who finds herself falling for what she despised others for.
Tears of the dethronement of willpower and imbibed values.
Tears of a lady whose father's strict stance forbids her from falling in love.

"But I'm not attracted to him.....God Forbid"

She sped off to her room, ashamed of her emotional outburst.

(To be continued)