My parents’ marriage ended before it even truly began. By the time everything fell apart, I was just three years old, and my brother was eleven months. My mother took off with another man, leaving the two of us behind.

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My father was living with his sister in the city then, trying to make ends meet. So we were in the village with our aunt.

A few months after my mother left, one of my other aunts came to the village for a funeral. At the end of her stay, she was asked to take me back to the city with her. Everyone said life in the city would be better for me. I believed them.

I thought maybe, finally, I’d have a home where I’d be loved and cared for. Little did I know, I was walking into another kind of loneliness.

Living with my aunt felt like being invisible. I was like a ghost in that house—unloved, unappreciated, and barely noticed. I did chores, tried to please her, tried to earn even the smallest bit of affection, but nothing ever worked. No matter what I did, it was never enough.

When I turned seven, my aunt’s husband started touching my private parts whenever she was away. He would show me adult films and threaten to unalive me if I ever told anyone. He was an army officer who had two guns and a sword. I didn’t doubt what he could do.

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He did whatever he wanted. I never said anything until he impregnated me when I turned 14. He told my aunt that I seduced him when he was drunk. He fed me words to tell my aunt, to make his story believable. “If you say otherwise, your aunt will not live,” he threatened.

After giving me pills to take to get rid of it, my aunt chased me out of the house. Nobody believed me when I told them when it all started. They thought I was just trying to ruin a good man’s name. I even called my aunt one day and told her the truth. She got angry and called me all sorts of names.

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The painful thing about my life is that I’ve never really felt loved. Not by my parents, not by anyone. My mother and father have moved on and built new families, families where they seem happy, families that don’t include me. It’s as if I never existed. Sometimes I think of them and wonder if they ever think about me, if they ever regret leaving me behind.

Now I’m 28 years old, but the sadness still lingers. I feel alone, unwanted, and broken. I try to forgive my past, but it’s hard. I’ve learned to live with it, to smile when I need to, but deep down, I’m still that little child waiting for someone to love her.

—Faith

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