Oh, my…! What can I do to help you? I’m still madly deeply in love with you, but my heart is scarred with anger and reproach. Did you say I don’t understand you? No, I understand you very well, thoroughly enough. That’s why I still grieve when everyone looks at me with pity. It hurts my pride with a deep wound impossible to heal, the one I have decided to bear my whole life. News that you have fallen gravely ill makes me very depressed. I feel your sufferings and if I were there by your side, I would take care of you the way a girl takes care of her lover, the way people want me to do.
People want me to listen to their own negative thoughts that could break me down. My lover was sick, and my friends seemed jealous about us and they never wanted us to be together. They started telling different stories to my ill lover, trying to show him that I was not taking care of him. My ill lover is still in the hospital because he suffers from cancer. Meanwhile, the suffering I am facing in my uncle’s house makes it too hard to persevere. I was hospitalized earlier before the ill lover got hospitalized. I spent 7 months there. My former lover was sick and felt like I wasn’t caring for him, while on the other hand, I was also sick without him knowing that I was also going through difficulties on my own under my uncle and aunt’s house.
My uncle and aunt never liked my success, their main aims were to see me grow without being educated. The reason was because I am not their biological child. These are the same people who made sure to see tears on my face if I rejected their negative ideas. These two scenarios are related in a way: on the one hand, a lover is sick, complaining that I am too hard to please, telling me that he is not going to recover no matter what and he has a few chances to survive. On the other hand, I am sick as well and have been spending several months in the hospital.
But everyone forgets that I only have one responsibility: taking care of myself and being that greatest woman, I’ve always dreamed of being. When I was still doing my secondary school education, my uncle and aunt refused to pay for my school fees required to continue with my education. They expected me to quit and believe that without education I could live a better life. But to me it all seemed like a dream. I rejected their hopes of me being illiterate. No one wanted to give me a chance to express myself and narrate my story to show them how I felt. No one until I met my lover, who is now ill and dying.
When I was a teenager, I did not get a chance to be raised by my own parents. Instead, I was raised by my paternal uncle who was very cruel and never liked me from the beginning. I used to wake up every morning to do house chores before I left for school. The saddest part of it, there was a time when I was supposed to write an exam and everyone in that house was against the idea of me going to school to write my exams. Their goal was for me to spend the whole day at home following their instructions for house chores. I refused the idea because that was my final examination where every child from that class had to pass the exams in order to go to another class. They locked me inside the house so that I would not have a chance of going back to school.
Yes, this lover was very special. He helped me tell my story by helping me organize my story lines and talking to a certain publishing company. He is involved in this story because without him my story could not have any meaning. He made me understand humanity and understand selfishness. To me it was like a dream came true to narrate my story and allow everyone around the world to read it after publishing the article. He encouraged me to follow my heart and tell my story without fear.
It was hard for me to write my story alone because I was afraid of being judged.
Everyone wants to live carefree in total righteousness and love, yet the community still finds so many reasons to talk about you and everything you do. No, people will think that you are stupid and easy—that you let others climb onto your shoulders and straddle your neck and push your head down. Therefore, you must fight, but to fight you must have experience and a solid foundation of overcoming the worst.
4 April, 2023
