Kim

She knew she was beautiful. But her parents' words, like poisonous snakes, crawled into her heart and left a cold fear there. "You are too fat," they said, and her sister, succumbing to their influence, refused to play with her.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, falling onto the pages of her diary. She wrote about her pain, her feelings of loneliness, her desire to be accepted for who she was.

One day, unable to bear it any longer, she ran to the guard, a young man with kind eyes. "I'm fat," she sobbed, "Nobody loves me."

He looked at her with his clear eyes and, without saying a word, picked her up in his arms and spun her around the room. She felt light, free, as if she had flown above her fears.

"You're not heavy," he said as he set her down on the floor. "You're beautiful."

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