Ella
Two out of three days, I have contemplated committing suicide. I’ve thought of ways to take my life and get done with all this pain because I do not know what to do with all of it.
If I could, I’d give some to the greedy, selfish politicians fattening their arses with our hard earned money and still lusting for our sweat and blood, but none of them have the balls to stand any of it. Bloody cowards!
It’s like ripping the heart open and jamming it with needles; the pain. Like a woman in labor being urged to push harder after being told the baby died in her womb. Like an ache from the prints of a lost soul mate. It’s like stabbing yourself in the heart, holding the knife in, and waiting for the last breath.
I feel it every day, you know; it never goes away. Even when Robert’s hand gently searches my body for any part with desire, the pain rises above the passion and the pleasure, right into the wounds all over my body, and forms a coldness he can never warm.
I know I lost my last piece of humanity when I lost her. She was the beat of my heart, everything that filled my hollowness and made me whole. Now, this empty shell I call a body doesn’t recognise this life existing in me.
First, I hated her. Right when I realised she was inside me. I loathed, cursed, and swore never to let her see the light of day. I did not want her or the idea of her.
You see, when you get raped by three hungry, merciless men who have nothing to live or die for but your body, you’re not left with any mental strength to withstand the possible stunt of pregnancy.
It takes everything from you; your dignity, your pride, your emotions, and all the bits that make up your soul. It pushes your body to the limit, scrapes all the life out of you, and fills you up with shame, guilt, trauma, and silence.
But you do not know that until the wreck and havoc start unfolding and the mass of pain inside you starts to spread, and merge with a numbness growing in the hole left by what used to be your soul.
The doctor said I was lucky I survived, but the violence that was done to my body was beyond damage, I had lost everything that belonged wholly to me; everything I called mine.
Two months later, after the doctor stitched and patched me back to life, my body gave in to the pain and havoc inside me. I woke up in the hospital, my neighbor, Fatma, staring down at me with eyes full of pity.
Poor thing! She lost her whole family in a car accident a year ago, now those monsters have done this to her. It must be too much for one person. These were the only words I heard from Fatma before passing out again.
Hours later, when I received the news, Fatma was seated by my bed, rocking my shoulder. I wanted to tell the doctor to get it out of me, to scrap every last bit of it out of my body and cleanse me of all its attachment, but I just lay there with my mouth shut, struggling to find any strength left in my bone to open my mouth.
For a whole month after Fatma took me in, I stayed in bed, leaving her with the burden of nursing and babysitting me. She walked me to the toilet, bathed me, and fed me like a baby. All the time, I never spoke a word to her; the only sound she ever heard from me was my sniffing and loud gulps of breath when I was choking on my tears.
She dragged me out and sat with me in the sun, walked me around her house, made my hair, and called her nurse friend to check on me and the baby.
I developed complications in the last trimester and spent most of the days in hospital. Even though everything inside me wanted to get rid of that baby, I never even once tried to harm it.
Maybe because it was the only thing alive inside me, and with everything in me dead, I did not know what I would be without it.
She was born three weeks early through an emergency Caesarian. Fatma named her Ella, after my mother Helena. For another month, I was in the hospital with Fatma running up and down the hospital corridors like a nurse on duty.
Seeing Ella in that incubator birthed in me a new life, a heart that would only beat as long as she was breathing. Everything that had died inside me now lived in her, and I knew right there that I had been reborn.
She would have turned five today. We would have gone to Mwendas’ ice cream shop before going to the castles. Mom, toka haraka twende kwa weda, ashcream itaisha. She would say, pulling me out of the house by my clothes.
I never held her in my hands to say goodbye or feel her pale, lifeless body. She was taken by men in white overalls, wrapped in a thick plastic paper that will never let her breathe even if she wanted to find her way back to me.
She was buried like an animal. Like she never deserved me or life, carrying my heart with her. Now all I am left with is pain, loss, and the emptiness threatening to swallow me.
Maybe Corona was the punishment I got for not wanting her first, or maybe the virus did not come to steal her from me but to set me free from her. But tell me, doc, how much does one person have to lose for them to have lost too much?
“A man once said, loss and possession, death and life, are one. There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.” I say. “Do you think we can still do something for Ella’s birthday?”
Silence.
About the author:
Gracey Eunice is a Special needs teacher by profession, committed to raising disability awareness, a digital marketer by training, with a great niche in content creation, and a writer by passion. She finds solace in writing and peace in telling stories about her, mental health and things happening in her environment. Her headaches, she says, are from smiling too much.
If not on her blog, The Mirrored Voice, you can always read her on her Facebook page @Gracey Eunice.
