I was nine when he first touched me.
He was supposed to be my uncle and someone I trusted till he pushed my panties aside and began caressing my bottom while I was asleep.
The tingling sensation awoke me. Groggily, I opened my eyes and turned my neck to the side to see his creepy, smiling face looming over mine.
Tiredly, I drew my panties back up and immediately went back to sleep.
But he didn't stop. I was too tired to react the second time but by the time I woke up again, he was sweaty and breathing heavily.
Till this moment, the details of that day have remained a blurry memory. One that I cannot decipher or pick apart no matter how hard I try to.
...
I was thirteen when the stalking and cat-calls began.
It all started with my discovery of a social media website.
With the limited screen time I managed to get, I would log into the account I had hastily created with the help of my friends, and begin browsing through the many hidden wonders.
Meeting new people was fascinating till I started meeting the wrong ones.
The first and most memorable out of all of them was a thirty-nine-year-old man who told me that I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
At first, the compliment made me blush and feel all giddy inside but slowly, I began to grow irritated with how he would speak to me.
He always wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, the people I visited, and what I was wearing.
Foolishly, I would entertain his questions and answer his frequent calls in my bathroom.
Until he asked me to meet him in a hotel. I may have been stupid but I wasn't so stupid to meet a middle-aged man in a hotel room.
Even if I was crazy with no wise thought in my head, my parents would never let me go anywhere.
I blocked him everywhere.
However, two days after I did that, he called with a different number, and as soon as I found out that it was him, I blocked the number as well.
It didn't stop there though. He found ways to call and message me at odd hours of the night to the point that I had to switch off my phone to avoid his calls.
One Saturday morning, I switched on my phone, and immediately, a call from an unknown number came through.
Shakily, I answered the call.
There was only heavy breathing.
"Hello?" I said, my voice wavering.
"Nancy, my wife, why do you treat your husband this way?"
I didn't respond.
"You don't want to talk to me? That is okay. Nancy, I lay this curse on you. You will never find anyone to love or marry you for as long as you live. For using my emotions and feelings for you to play games, someone out there will do the same to you."
From that day, he never called or texted me again.
I had always been taught that curses were potent. If someone laid a curse on another, it was very likely that it would work.
Weeks after that, I continued to pray to God to free me from the curse even though I was sure I didn't do anything wrong to him.
A month later, I became confident that God had heard and answered my prayers, so I moved on with my life and reduced my interactions on Facebook.
It wasn't enough and the stalking happened again. This time around, it was a twenty-nine-year-old man.
And with his arrival into my space, the cat-calls from men when I walked down the street and the market, intensified.
...
I was sixteen and was just admitted into the university when I got my first, real boyfriend. Not a boy of my age but a twenty-three-year-old final-year student.
He was witty, handsome, and charming. By then, I had read enough romance novels and watched enough Disney fairy tales to have a warped view of love and relationships.
I believed I was in love with him and boy, he took advantage of it.
"You are a very special girl, Nancy." He said this to me the first day I met him in night study class.
He saw that I was struggling to understand a particular course and offered to help. Gladly, I accepted his aid and we hit it off instantly.
I wasn't blessed with the best memory so I must have forgotten all that had happened to me before when I willingly went to his lodge at his behest.
"Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are, Nancy?"
He looked at me with eyes of sin that I mistook for a gaze of affection and care.
"Your body is enough to bring a man to his knees."
That statement should have been enough to send me running if I had simply remembered that the twenty-nine-year-old man had said the very same thing to me.
At thirteen, my breasts were way bigger than those of girls of my age which led many people to think that I was older than I was even though I still had a baby face and baby fat distributed around my body.
At sixteen though, the baby fat was gone, and my breasts were bigger than before. Maybe, that was what drew his attention.
Sometimes, I wondered if that was what drew the attention of every guy I talked to.
When he inched closer to me and captured my mouth in a kiss that felt nothing like the Harlequin novels described, I succumbed to my fate.
The part of me that wanted to explore was stronger that the part of me that warned me to leave and never explore.
That evening, I lost my virginity to a twenty-three-year-old final-year student in a small, lavender-scented room.
I didn't remember crying but when I returned to my hostel after, my eyes were red and puffy, and the left side of my face had angry red hand-prints streaked across it.
He never spoke to me after that evening and I never saw him in night study class again. I never tried going back to his lodge.
I was only sixteen and I had already begun to hate myself and I wished for a different body every day. One that would never draw attention from any man ever again.
...
I was seventeen when I let a man between my legs once more. It seems I never learned from experience.
I couldn't control the raging hormones inside of me at that age and so, I let myself be impaled by a twenty-five-year-old medical student.
From then on, I looked everywhere for something or someone to fill the empty void inside of me.
The empty void between my legs somehow always got filled but the gaping hole in my heart remained open- wide and yawning.
I never actually knew what I was looking for and I never found it. In my frantic search for it, I was used and discarded like junk. I believe junk got treated better.
I don't remember being loved genuinely by the opposite sex.
The only words I got from them were: "I love your breasts."
"I can't wait to have intercourse with you multiple times."
"I don't think I can control myself around you, Nancy."
"I want to check off every activity on my bucket list. Wouldn't you like to know what they are?"
"Fuck, I want to suck on those soft breasts of yours."
"Wouldn't you want me to give you an earth-shattering orgasm? I promise that you won't regret it."
Not once did they ever sincerely tell me that they loved me or that I was one of the most important people in their lives.
Was that what I was looking for? I can't be too sure. Maybe it was. Maybe that was the vacuole that needed to be filled. Maybe it wasn't. Perhaps, I needed to fix something inside of myself first... By myself.
I didn't come to that realization yet.
...
I was nineteen when I became a shadow of myself.
Author's note: Hi. Something made me inclined to write this piece and share it with you all. I hope you relate to it and maybe form your interpretations of it. Thank you!