Loving oneself - The greatest love of all

Potter! He agreed he had a weird name.

When he was in third grade, everyone called him Harry Potter. To add to it, he was a scrawny 9-year-old with bangs almost covering his brows and a crooked nose; One he got from falling off the old tree house at his grandmother's place.

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Those bigger kids in class always pulled him by his ears, asking him to perform some magic for them, getting straws from the bin for him to use as a wand. He was famous but in the most embarrassing way.

He didn't know what exactly they didn't like about him. His mother used to say he was the sweetest, little thing she had ever seen and every other member of his family seemed to agree. Why did the kids at school think differently?

Apart from his two identical cousins and the beggar's kid who lived at the end of his street, he barely had any friends.

Potter grew up like that. Alone. Rejected most of the time.

Whenever he had an event or a function to be at, he would spend days rehearsing his words and behavior.

“Maybe if I walked up to the guys and said, hey Dwayne, what's up guys? They would think I'm cool and even want to roll with me for that day. But every time he ended up in front of them, he only managed as much as a squeaky “Hello” and ended up running off somewhere quiet to cry.

After high school, Potter was granted a scholarship to Oxford University, a place most of his colleagues struggled to gain acceptance. When he told most of them, instead of a hearty “congratulations”, they sneered at him.

It was then he accepted his fate, and his bangs that seemed to never stop growing.

Oxford was good to him as he was good for it. Six months in he had begun making a name for himself, topping his class almost effortlessly. If there was anything he did have, it was ‘an electronic brain’. That was what his mother called it.

“Potter? Hi” It was the day of resumption and Potter had walked into the cafeteria to have a quick bite before he went over to see Professor Westgrill, the man who took him as his son. There was a petite blonde-haired standing before him, wearing the biggest smile he had ever seen.

“Hi,” he took his glasses off and placed them on the spot beside his tray.

“Can I join you?” He nodded, too shocked to speak.

“My name is Dawn. I attend physics class with you”. He raised his brows. He knew Steven Quake, the guy who posed as the genius he wasn't, and Mary Erland, the girl who kept asking him to date her, but he didn't know this one.

“I'm sorry, I can't…”

“It's fine”. She waved the apology away with her fork. “I love your bangs anyway, but they would look so much better if they were drawn back neatly.

He had never stopped to think of restructuring his hairdo. He always had bangs and didn't know what he would look like without them. But he took Dawn’s advice and made the barber draw his bangs back in a sleek way over the weekend.

The next week at school, he got stares, letters from girls, and nods from guys. That was the first time in his entire life he had gotten so much attention.

Potter looked closely in the mirror from then. He noticed how long his lashes were, how his full brows were carved beautifully, and how full his light pink lips stood.

He just realized that he was extremely handsome. He had given away 20 years of his life to Dwayne and his mean friends from third grade to high school simply because they said he was rat-faced and had lice-infested hair.

It was 3 weeks before Valentine's Day when he met Dawn for the first time. He usually wrote a love note to his mom and spent the day locked up in the laboratory on Valentine's Day but this year, he wanted to do something different. He wanted to celebrate himself.

For being a genius at a tender age, for being so consistent with his academic success, he was going to make up for all the times he hated himself for not being as big as Dwayne, or as handsome as other boys in school, and for making a new friend for the first time in 6 years.

He decided that he was going to empty his college savings to get new clothes like Dawn suggested, new pairs of shoes, and treat himself to an expensive meal.

He wanted to do what he had lagged in doing for 20 years; He was going to start showing himself love.