Victim of Circumstance | UNDER RIGOROUS EDITING

Chapter 4 - Fight & Flee

||Valeria||

It doesn’t matter how much I try to forget the subject. It doesn’t count how far I run because it’ll always haunt me. I’m living prove. Everything I do, everywhere I go, it still follows me like a shadow. I wanted to be strong. So much. God, I still want to be strong. I want to fight back but I’m helpless. I feel invalid, incapacitated.

The first few weeks I tried so hard not think about what the dog did to me. Thinking if I just try hard enough to avoid the subject, forcing my thoughts not to wander in that direction, then it will just go away. That I’ll forget it and it’ll be just like a bad dream that I woke up from and the next day it was just gone. But the thing is, it didn’t. No. it’s real. This is not a made up fantasy. What happened in fact really did come to pass. And to me at that.

I try to smile. I try by all means to laugh but even doing that hurts. It hurts so much knowing that I’ll never be the same. That my life won’t be the same again. Like ever. No matter what good befalls me today, tomorrow or after five years, I’ll always be walking around with this scar. A big gaping one that can’t be healed by worldly medication.

I’m living in an endless chasm of fear. Always frantic, disorientated and restless. It’s like I’m always on alert to defend myself. Waiting for someone—something that’ll strike and repeat what that… Just thinking about it is excruciating, because if I do, then the memories of the unbearable smell of his cologne, the foul smell of alcohol in his mouth and his hands roaming my body cloud my mind, flashing through my head in split seconds. And don’t mistake me, I try by all means to refrain from those memories, but no. It doesn’t help.

I’m afraid to sleep at night. Afraid that if I do, if I just close my eyes for a millisecond than everything will come crashing back like a hurricane ready to obliterate my entire existence, reminding me slowly and painfully that I lost my dignity to a nameless, faceless chauvinistic pig. That I’ll never have the say of how and when I would like to. He snatch that right away from me, and I’ll be forever broken, dirty and unworthy. He took and crushed my life in pulverized nothings.

It doesn’t matter what I wanted to do for my future. All the dreams and aspirations I had are all squelched, because with this at the back of my mind every step of the way, I’ll never amount to anything.

I know I was never a good person. I know that now. Living the life of a poor makes you cognizant to the things you considered irrelevant once upon a time. That the world doesn’t revolve around money and privileges, because you can lose all those things at the snap of the finger, and if you do, then there’s no going back. Those people you once looked down on are one step ahead of you. They’re the ones that will give you the dirty eye you once gave them. And does it hurt.

I’m on a roller coaster of cluster of mixed emotions. And not emotions I can no longer bear with. It seems like this anger, fear and disorientation and guilt enacted a natural instinct of survival in me. Something I don’t even like for a second. It turns me into a violent somebody that I never liked and wanted to be. And what pains me in all this is the fact that I can’t get myself to tell anyone what happened to me. In fact, nobody knows. Not even Ndeshi. I feel so dirty. I feel… there are no words left to describe what I feel.

Currently seated in the English class, I can’t seem to hear anything. My vision is hazy. I don’t know from what, probably the tears. I can only hear our English teacher’s voice in the distant talking about King Lear. My vision gets dark and I’m seeing him. All I can see and feel is that faithful night where my already hellacious life was plunge into seamless depths of hell. What he did to me. The reek of the river bed. The sounds the pig made. Everything comes rushing back at the speed of light and it’s hard to contain the pained groan I hear at the far back of my head. It’s happening all over again. From the beginning with every intricate detail.