He side-eyes me over his shoulder for a brief, icy moment, then continues walking out without saying anything.
The door shuts behind him, and my tired body slumps back against the damp pillow.
I’m left alone with nothing but the devastating noise of my own weeps and the gaping hole where my baby used to be.
Eight months later...
Istand in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in the bathroom, water sliding down my naked frame like it’s trying to erase something that can’t be undone.
My vacant eyes trace the deep scars etched across my skin, raised and permanent.
They’re visible proof of what happened, but they’re not the worst of it. The worst is what can’t be seen. The quiet, isolated depression that no reflection will ever fully capture.
Eight months… eight exhausting fucking months of physical therapy. Of learning how to move again through a body that no longer feels like it belongs to me. A body I no longer want. Of forcing myself upright when everything inside me wanted to collapse.
And still… I’m not better. I’ll never be better. Some wounds don’t heal, they simply learn how to keep bleeding silently, so the rest of the world doesn’t have to watch.
Law has never comforted me—not once.
He didn’t hold me while I screamed for the baby I never got to meet.
He never even acknowledged that I had been carrying his child when he let them almost kill me.
He never gave a shit about the trauma I’ve faced because multiple men viciously gang raped me in our home in front of him.
He simply discarded it—the same way he’s trying to slowly discard me.
He moves through this house like a ghost who owns everything, ignoring my existence until the rare moments he decides to remind me I’m still his property.
He never fails to tell me the next time I try to leave him, they won’t find a body, only pieces. And even then, even whilst I’m decaying in the dirt, I’ll never truly be rid of him.
I gaze at the stranger in the mirror—the abused woman with dead eyes and a ruined body—and feel nothing but a deep, aching emptiness.
I am a mother to a child who never drew its first breath, a prisoner in the home of the man who planned and killed it. And every single fucking day, I wake up and wonder why I am still fighting to survive in a world that ended for me years ago.
From the day my mother died, I have been fed nothing but abuse—served up for men’s bizarre amusement, their disturbing fantasies, and their sick sense of greed.
I once believed suffering was deserved—that it was a debt paid back in full, that people always reaped what they sowed. But the world has taught me a far crueler truth…
It’s always the innocent who bleed the deepest.
We keep reaching for the light with trembling hands, holding onto its fading warmth like drowning souls bargaining for air that will never last.
But even after the darkness devoured everything—my body, my baby, and my faith in anything good—I’m still here, living each day by some punishing persistence.
Still here… but gone inside.
It feels like a sluggish corrosion, eating away at whatever fragments of me are left, until I’m not sure what remains is still a person at all.
Abuse has become my unwanted home, and I don’t want to be here anymore.
I want to slip into the quiet, somewhere soft and everlasting. I hate myself with every breath I take. It clings to me, constant and suffocating, as though I’ve been made to carry it in my lungs.
I can’t eat anymore without smelling raw meat on my father’s skin—that same sick, metallic stench rising from every plate like a ghost that refuses to stay buried.
I can’t drink without tasting vodka flooding my insides again, burning, choking, and drowning me in the memory of being raped while their laughter rings in my ears.
And I can’t close my eyes without feeling their hands everywhere. Rough, ravenous, and cruel, sliding inside me, ripping, tearing, and pulling my baby out in chunks while I screamed.
