My story is quite long but I’ll try to dwell on the key details. It has taken me three years to finally share my story.
I still remember the look on his face when I first showed my boyfriend, Jeff, the result of my pregnancy test kit. He was clueless and had no idea what the two lines meant and I had to break it down to him that it was positive. There was nothing on his face, not surprised not amazed, none of that. He stood there looking at me and for the very first time in three years since we started dating, I saw a different guy other than the one I fell in love with.
“But how?” he asked with a raised tone. “Are you even sure it’s mine?” he continued. I never saw that coming. My boyfriend of three years whom I had been loyal to all through was about to deny the pregnancy that I had just discovered about. “Of course it’s yours,” I answered back. By now tears were streaming down my face. All this was too much for me to bear.
He started pacing back and forth, as if in deep thoughts, “But you do realize you cannot keep the baby, I mean we are still in campus, what effect will that have on us?” I did realize that much as well. Keeping the baby would cost me a lot. I was a sponsored student on campus, and my single mum back in the village had two more kids to look after. She was really struggling to put food on the table for my siblings and I knew very well my chances of losing the sponsorship if they learnt of my pregnancy were very high.
“We will figure it out,” he said before picking his jacket and leaving me in my hostel room. I could not sleep that night and waited for Jeff to text me but he never did. A day passed and I had not heard from him. This was unusual of him as he also resided from the school’s hostels thus we used to meet every day. The next day I decided to pass by his room only to learn from his roommate that he had left for home that early morning. He had left behind an envelope and asked to be given in case I came by. The walk back to the ladies hostel never seemed that long than it did that way.
My life was suddenly taking a turn I never saw coming. Inside the envelope was a sum of 1500 shillings and nothing had accompanied the money, not even a letter. I tried to reach him through his phone but it was switched off. It took me three weeks to realize that Jeff was never coming back. This was after I learned that he had submitted a deferment letter to the school’s administration till the next semester. And one thing was clear to me, I was alone in this. I opened up to a friend about my situation and she offered to take me to this place that would be “less painful “and affordable.
I had to lie to my mother about this school project that needed some money and it took her another three weeks to raise two thousand. That day my friend woke me up early. She walked me through this overcrowded wretched town to a dark alley that easily depicted whatever was going on behind the doors was scary. The man who welcomed us was cold and had a pale look. He told us to wait on a bench that sat at the entrance of the room, and he knew what had brought us here, it was as if the place conducted only one service, and you only came here for that service.
At that moment I was numb. I was not afraid, I was not happy, I wasn’t feeling anything. It didn’t take long before he appeared again, “Which one of you? Follow me.” I timidly woke up from my seat and followed him. What happened behind the closed door I had followed him into is an experience worse than a nightmare itself. I never imagined in my life I would live to go through something like that. He asked me to remove my inner wear and lay on an elevated bed with my legs apart. He continued to put gloves on and asked how old it was. There was no sedative used, I had to bear the pain.
He went on to introduce sharp objects that I would feel pain pierce the walls of my entire body. There laid more weird objects that I guessed were to go through me and I could not bear to witness him picking each one of them, and there I laid with my eyes closed as he kept going in through me with his equipment as I bore every pain that each tool carried with it. Long story short, it took about an hour for him to clear everything off me and after he was done, I was given some tablets to take that would supposedly take the pain away.
The next few weeks were followed with heavy bleeding and cramping that almost saw me lose my life. I really lost a lot of weight for the weeks I spent in bed at the hostels. I was not eating healthy either and it made it really hard for my body to keep with the too much of the blood I had lost. I had no one to talk to apart from the friend who had taken me there and she was hardly around. I became depressed and I could not talk to anyone about it. I saw myself unworthy and wished I could sleep myself to death and not wake up to see the light of the day.
I remember the days I inflicted physical pain on my skin so that I could feel alive, for at the moment the pain was the only thing that made me feel alive. It took me one whole year to pick myself up and had to live with what I had gone through. I was done pitying myself, crying for days after realizing that life out there was still going on. Life still goes on anyway. By now Jeff was back to school and he stayed away from me as much as he could. I later heard he found himself a new girlfriend and were always seen together. But to me, Jeff was dead and life for me was never the same.
I became anti-social and lost almost all of my friends and lost myself in the process as well. I was deeply hurting, although I pretended to be okay in the eyes of everyone. My picking myself up is a story on its own, and although it’s been almost three years, everything still haunts me to date.