< Translator’s note: The original formatting of the stories has been preserved. The translations aim to remain as close as possible to each author's original wording and expression.

 

I’m not at all used to sharing stories, but today I want to briefly tell a part of my life.

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For eight long years, I was in a relationship with a man. At first, everything was perfect, but over time, everything changed. He started saying I was fat, ugly, and stupid, and stopped showing any interest in me.

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Whenever I needed any help at all, he found a million excuses not to give it. He was constantly leaving me alone at home. Even when we went to his parents’ village, he would leave me there and go off to his friends, although after eight years of life together, I already thought of them as friends of both of us.

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When he went out with his friends, he’d say it was just the guys — even though their girlfriends were there too. He’d come home at night with his friends, not even noticing that I was asleep. They would make noise, drink, and smoke. And sometimes I’d wake up to find that there were no longer two of us in the bed but three or four — his friends had simply got in and fallen asleep beside us.

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I bought all the groceries and paid for every expense, while he said he was saving his money for our future. That future never came — all the money we had been “saving”, he took.

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Then he and his friends got into drugs. Over time, I lost all my friends, because they had started building their own families. I felt completely cut off from the world, because I didn’t even have anyone to talk to about it.

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One day, he hit me hard and knocked me off a bicycle. I fell and hit my head on the edge of something, injuring myself. It was agonisingly painful, and in that moment I understood: this is the end.

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A.; story shared in 2023 as part of the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” campaign