It has been two years since I got arrested. Prison has become both a home and a living hell for me. A year ago, I saw a newspaper with a very emotional front page. Palesa’s parents were conducting a march in the streets of Cape Town, raising awareness to both young and old people about fighting gender based violence and normalising speaking out.

The article brought up many emotions for me. It was the most painful thing I had ever seen, and it had my name included in it as one of the murders and people who brought pain to a lot of families. I started feeling as if I deserve to be behind bars.

These past few months have been nothing but pain to me. I keep having horrifying dreams, and I sometimes even hear Palesa screaming, and my Koko on the other side, crying and shouting my name. I even attempted to commit suicide more than 3 times in this short time period. Attending therapy made no difference, because no matter what I was, people would always portray me as a murder, a rapist, a failure, and a danger to society and to young women out there.

I have also been experiencing abuse inside these prison walls I portray as hell. Every time I think about these experiences, I blank out of this would and lose my mind. I started having anxiety attacks, and I would sometimes even feel as if Palesa was choking me. I even made it a reality that maybe I was sick, and that maybe I had kill her and I was only convincing myself that I was innocent whereas I was not.

“Why would I suffer that much if I did not commit any crime. I started seeing myself as one of those criminal offenders, because if I was with them, that meant I was one of them.”

Those were the words that kept playing in my mind. I hated myself.

I was later sent to a cell with many mentally disturbed inmates for a period of 6 months, and my mental health was in a promising state. Every day, I would wake up and sit alone. I did not want to associate myself with anyone. Some of the inmates would have visitors, and it would not make sense to me why anyone would visit an animal, a rapist, a murder, or that maybe some families were easy to forgive and forget.

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Tell us: What do you think could be the reason for the narrator to feel the way he does?