I was only 7years old when the world shifted beneath my feet. That day began like any other—children playing outside, the scent of firewood in the air, laughter bouncing off the walls. But a car pulled into the compound, and everything changed.
My mother stepped out, supported by a friend, tears streaming uncontrollably. She walked straight to my father's photo and collapsed before it, her sobs shaking the room. I didn't fully understand what was happening, but I knew enough—something terrible had happened to him. My brothers and I cried too, helpless in a world that suddenly felt too big and too cruel.
Something had happened to my father.Something terrible.Something final.
I didn't fully understand death, but I understood my mother's cry. It was the kind of cry that told you the world you knew had ended.
So I cried too. We all did.
Neighbors rushed into the house, trying to calm her, trying to hold us. But nothing they said could touch the pain in that room.
The next day, we traveled to the village for the burial. Only my oldest brother followed his father's body; I was too young, not allowed to go. I regret it to this day, but I never asked to follow. I didn't want my mother to know I remembered the pain, the sharp sting of loss that clung to me even as a child. She was already drowning in grief; she didn't need to see her daughter suffer too.
After the burial, my father's family tried to take us in, insisting that my mother was too young to care for three children alone. They planned to take my second brother and me, leaving the eldest with her. But we refused. We would follow our mother, no matter what. That was how she kept custody of us.
To take care of us, my mother began working as a food seller in a restaurant. Every Monday morning she left before sunrise and returned on Saturday evenings, exhausted but determined. She always made sure we had everything we needed at home.
But there was something she could not ignore:I was her only daughter, and she could leaving me alone with her brothers, but didn't trust leaving me with her unmarried neighbors. The world was already showing her how unsafe it could be, and she would rather suffer herself than risk anything happening to me.
So she made a decision that changed the course of my life.
She took me to her sister—the one who had just gotten married, the one who lived close to her workplace. She believed I would be safer there, protected, cared for, shielded from the dangers of being a young girl.
But she didn't know that the place she thought would protect me would become the birthplace of my deepest wounds.
That was how I started living with my aunt.And that was when my worst nightmare began.