I always knew that I would be married off to the highest bidder from a tender age. My mother would always make it her duty or daily task to sit me down and paint it in my head that, when I get old enough to know better, a rich man was going marry me and I was going to live my happily ever after.

But, what my mother never told me was the worst case scenario of being sold to a rich man. Now, here I am, experiencing a different dream from what I was sold. It is all a nightmare! If only they had allowed me to get educated and independent, and not to depend on a man. Then maybe, just maybe, I would be at my happiest as we speak.

At the age of 16, when I was doing Grade 11, I was forced to leave school by my parents and I was married off to a man old enough to be my father. I tried begging my parents not to marry me off, but they did it anyway, despite my tears.

In the marriage, I was literally stripped of everything I knew, and I had to adapt, adjust, and come to terms with my new norm. That norm was for me to share the rest of my life with a wealthy man who had lost with wife, a man I hardly knew, together with his three rude children, one of which was my age and the two others younger than me. I had to get used to how they did things and how to treat my husband. I also had to give my purity to an old man, and all the dreams I had about my career, the dream house, the dream car, the dream job, and the dream love life, were all gone just like that.

I was submissive, hard-working, and loyal, yet I got rewarded with was punches and kicks. The children also fuelled it by always finding faults in everything I did, and sometimes making things up.

After a while, I started getting physically, emotionally, verbally, and even sexually abused by the hands of a man that had promised to protect and take care of me when he took me home. Every week came with a new scar, and they were either physical or spiritual in nature. I became broken minute by minute, and it is still the same way now. But I have actually learned to embrace the pain now, and as sick as what I’m about to say is, I have grown to love the pain instilled in me.

You know what’s crazy? The fact that my parents are condoning all these sinister acts. I used to cry to them until I realised that it was all useless. My mother would always preach “Emendweni kuyabekezelwa mtanami”, and my father would just dismiss me and say I was making up stories to leave my marriage.

What kind of parents do that? Do they hate me that much? What wrong did I ever do to them to deserve such hate?

It gets better! There was this one fateful day when my so called husband lost a big contract at work thanks to his spoiled child, Smilokuhle, throwing a tantrum at his place of work during a meeting, claiming that I had slapped her. My husband lost it with me that day, and I ended up in a coma. I later woke up to the news that I would no longer be able to conceive, and that I had miscarried the child I had been carrying. But that was the last nail in the coffin for me, and the hate I developed for my parents, my husband, and his children crazily increased.

Now, here I am today, 23 years old, and nothing much has changed besides what I am planning to do today. I have been patient for far too long. Well, not anymore! I have been claiming to be okay with everything, hell, I have even been convincing myself that I am okay and that all is well.

Now my question is, what if “okay” is not okay anymore? What if I have taken enough bull and I no longer want to anymore? What then?

I am no longer normal. I am far away from normal, and I am not planning on acting rationally at this point. Rational and Normal do not exist anymore in my vocabulary, and may God forgive me for what is about to happen today.

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