Break Free From Your Prison

“I have never loved you, and I can never will. It was my father and your parents who made the decisions and arranged for our marriage. I agreed because I didn’t want to disappoint my father as he was dying of cancer. I didn’t mind marrying you because you were my father’s choice and besides, you are nice and pretty,… and I am of age.“ These words are still etched in the corner of my memory until today. My lips quivered as I tried hard to suppress the emotions that exploded in my heart. A lump formed in my throat as I tried to push aside the words in denial of the reality that beset me.

Although the words were spoken in an icy cold manner that it devastated me inside out, I adamantly refused to believe or to accept them. So quietly, and resolutely I made the decision to save my marriage which was less than a year old, as I rubbed my swelling tummy. So I decided that was the first time and also the last time I would ever bring up the subject of his late night outings – never again I mentioned or even dared to stop him in years that followed.

Night after night he would leave the house and came back during the wee hours of the morning. I let him be, while inside of me, I was weeping, alone, I felt neglected. Telling my family, I thought would display my dirty linen in public because it was such a shame in the eyes of society to have a failed marriage.

A few months later, my father-in-law’s cancer spread to his throat, so he underwent a surgery. During those months, I was too pre-occupied with visiting my father-in-law in the hospital, and often, had to spend some nights there until the day he returned home. However, I spent day and night by his bedside because I felt alone and neglected as much as he did. We kept each other company although by then, he couldn’t speak anymore, and neither could he take solid food. Liquid food and drinks had to be poured down the tube that was fixed through a hole in his throat. On the day I fetched him from the hospital, the doctor taught me how to feed him, clean him and how to give him pain-killers by injections.

My heart was already crushed and in a roller-coaster ride of emotions throughout the last three months of my father-in-law’s life, as he went in and out of breathlessness and fit. I was losing a lot of weight due to much weary, anxieties and often felt nausea, mornings and evenings.

I was still in a daze during the days that followed my father-in-law’s death, when, in the doctor’s office, the gynecologist confirmed that I was pregnant. At home later, “I told you before that I didn’t love you and I will never change. I am not even ready to be a husband, let alone to be a father. Abort the baby.” Those words clung to my heart like a leech that sucked me of the little traces of self-worth that remained, leaving only self-blame to reside in me for years to come. When we were later told by a doctor that it was too late to do an abortion as it would jeopardize my life, the man of my life yelled, “Why didn’t you take any precaution before? Now YOU find your own way to support the baby and yourself.”

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I pressed on the pedal and went under the lorry. The next moment, the lorry stopped and the driver jumped down in horror. He stood in front of my wrecked car, shivering. Hearing the loud crash sound coming from underneath his lorry, he expected to find a body meshed in tangled metal.  But there I was, also shivering behind the wheel unscathed, while the car bonnet is folded up above a mass of tangled metal.

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A few months later, I laid in bed, in and out of consciousness as a result of a continuous bout of violence. Every moment was a blur as I lay with my head throbbing and my whole body covered with pain. At that moment, I had to make a final decision – to stay put and lost my sanity or to leave the dungeon for good.

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