RukkyI felt my first crushing pain the day I clocked 15. It was choking; an unbearable pain that went from just a dull throb to a cruel twisting of my heart until I couldn’t breathe. I never even got to know life before it came crashing down on me. That should have been the first cue that life would never be fair on me. My heart would come to shatter over and over and over again after that. Until I grew numb to the pain. But then, life never stopped dealing me cruelty. Not until I became a shell. A cold, empty, unfeeling shell. I was just a sheltered little girl who had yet to meet the monsters of the world. I never got to meet my father. My mother had been raped at 15 and I was the ugly taint left behind. I was the disgusting seed and visual evidence of the action of an animal; of the wickedness lady life dealt my mother until she took her last breath.
Maybe 15 is our nemesis. Mother never hated me. She should have. I ruined her life. I ruined her dreams. My birth desecrated every good that could have come out of her life. Why didn’t I die at birth? Why didn’t I get kidnapped as a baby? Why wasn’t life kind enough to spare her the pain of seeing me every single day? I never understood why she treated me with so much kindness. But I welcomed it. And I loved her with my whole existence. She was so graceful. So kind, so gentle. She desperately tried to hide the lifelessness in her eyes away from me. Mother protected me from her pain; she shielded me from the distant look of immense regret I caught in her eyes once in a while. Her eyes smiled but it also emitted immeasurable pain. Her mouth smiled but it also whispered wounds that never healed.
However she loved me through it all. With no support, with next to nothing. Through dark nights and difficult days. Mother gave it all up for me. Me; the evidence of her loss.
I looked out the window and noticed the darkness. The world outside moved in a fast blur and the farther the car went, the darker it became in the car. The police officer sitting beside me looked at me nervously. To her, I was the child with the lifeless eyes. The one who had no one. The one whom they were shipping off to a father she had never seen for a second. The hate in my heart grew but I maintained my cold mask. It’s one of the most useful tools I learnt from mother. Wearing a mask.
The town was a quiet one and theirs was the lone car on the road. It had been for the past 20 minutes. I looked at the quiet woman beside me as she absent mindedly played with the ring on her fourth finger. I sighed and adjusted myself on the car seat. The uncertainty was killing me.
After mother died, I had nowhere to go. I never knew her with any family or friend. The government handled her corpse. She had lived with so much sadness, and had forgotten to make connections with anyone. Or maybe she always knew she’d die and didn’t see the point in forming a bond with anyone. Not even for my sake. However, Mama Taye took me in. She was a widow who lived next door and fended for her 2 kids alone. Hers was a kindness I never expected. But she took me in; and cared for me for 4 months. Until she couldn’t anymore.
I pressed my cheeks against the car’s window and shook my leg vigorously; a nervous habit mother failed to make me stop doing. I hated not knowing. I hated being uprooted from everything I knew; even though it was now in complete shambles, and being dropped off with a nobody who had never had any contribution to my life for 15 years.
“Just a few more minutes and we’ll get there,” the voice interrupted my thoughts and I looked in the direction it come from. “How are you feeling about all of this?”
“How am I supposed to feel?” The coldness in my voice shocked even me on some days. In the last 4 months, I had perfected the art of wearing an impenetrable armour on my emotions even more than I did when mother was alive
Silence met my question and I saw pity fill the softened eyes that now laid on me. I hated pity. I detested it.
“I don’t need your pity.” I added. She sighed.
The car turned to a side street which paved way for a wider road that led directly to a lone house sitting in the distance. Even from afar, I could tell how magnificent the building was. It was built to oppress. And I felt oppressed. Small. The less distance between the car and the house, the smaller I felt. It was however unnerving to see how secluded it is from the rest of the town. There had been no house within any reasonable distance to the property.
The woman parked in the driveway and turned to look at me.
“Are you ready?”
I shrugged, then nodded stiffly before carrying my backpack, and the lone briefcase I had been instructed to carry with me. It contained close to no personal items or clothing. I took a few meaningful items out of everything we owned and left every other thing behind. I tried to assess my appearance; my shoulders were tense, my body felt rigid and the hand that wasn’t holding anything was clenched tightly into a fist.
It was too much display of emotion for someone who had become so cold.
I hated it.
The woman took my briefcase and walked towards the entrance of the house. I trudged silently beside her. My body had gone into flight or fight mode; almost like something alerted it that I was walking into danger. I was moving in with a man who had simply introduced himself as my father over the phone, and had commanded that I be ‘harvested’ into his presence. I was finally deserving of his presence. And it took the death of the only person who ever mattered to me.
I couldn’t have hated him more. But at that moment, all I felt was a peaceful calm. I was calm even when I stopped in front of him and he looked at me disdainfully; an evidence of his mistake? Perhaps. I was calm even when I saw the uncanny resemblance between me and him. I was calm even when I saw the woman whose hand he had intertwined in his. Even when I saw the 2 sons he had, who looked like they had never tasted an ounce of suffering in their lives.
I was calm when I met my father.
I was calm when I decided I’d kill him right there and then.
I was calm exactly 15 days later, when his lifeless eyes stared up at me.
I was calm when I stood over his body with blood gushing from his slit throat.
And I was calm as I cradled his head in my laps.
The murder weapon tightly clenched in my wrist.
Afterall, 15 is our nemesis.
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