TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING!

Kedei’s story

‘Sex is natural, and I find it interesting that society manages to screw it up.’~ Marilyn Monroe

I once wrote this quote, everywhere, at the back of journals, random pieces of paper I would eventually rumple and throw in the trash, and on sticky notes I hid from the eyes of everyone, maybe with some twisted belief that what God said was simply mis-constructed by the overly religious saints.

Maybe it was because I felt that spreading my legs like the gates of the Buckingham palace was all I needed to keep Damien, when he stopped calling out to me after lectures, blowing up my phone with praises, and I stopped catching him staring at me in the middle of a practical. 

Yet it still wasn’t enough. I felt a piece of myself leave, every time he would walk past me in the corridors, ignore my messages for hours, or scoff whenever I took benediction or a sermon at chapel, and then stare at his phone till I left the pulpit.

It was funny that I had become the dummy.

After that night, after I somehow survived his rough and painful thrusts, the color left the skies, the ones I once took pictures of when I had the slightest opportunity, lost all of its appeal to me, I enjoyed or was satisfied by little to nothing, not even writing cleared my thoughts, whenever my pen met with a paper, the letters became thorns and swords that pierced at my soul and tore at the leaves I had gathered to hide my nakedness from God. 

The cheerful and Christ like characters I wrote about, the ones I had fabricated, turned around and mocked me.

I had failed this God. I did not defend His cause. I disgraced the prophecy that was over me.

They say your writings reflect elements of your person, I was running away from the person I had become, I didn’t want to be the girl who gave up her innocence because of her biggest insecurity. Her inability to stand on the establishment of who she was. But who was I? The sex slave of a man that didn’t even fear God. But wasn’t I also the Son of God?

My mothers biggest fear had now become my reality. I could no longer smile at her, embarrassed, signaling for her to stop, when she bragged to her friends at the Parish back in Calabar and frenemies with the thick and sweaty moustaches that always came around every Sunday evening. Now I avoided their gatherings when she would call out my praises.

They were very different from the ones Damien would call out when his body weight crushed mine, and the profanities he would curse at me the weeks I happened to be on my period or had exams. 

They were polar opposites actually. 

My mother must have been shocked the night I snapped at her for simply calling me ‘priceless’, her proclamation may have been in the affirmative, but I really did feel price-less.

I was disgusted that the life I lived at home was built on glory that was now ancient, something I could no longer hold. I feared that she saw right through my front, the disappointment in her eyes and in her lowered head during Mother’s Days lasted for weeks, months and even years, yet some days I wished it was because she actually did see right through my façade. 

I wanted her to hold my shoulders firmly and scream “Kedei!” and slap me for having the thoughts that I did, and beat me for starting to desire his touch-heck-plant pepper seeds in my undies as she had always threatened to if I gave myself away.

I needed someone to see me. 

 I struggled to cry out to God, it was a lot easier to call out to him for simple things, things I believed I had an idea of how it would end. It was easier to surrender emotions that I could comprehend. But this, this was heavy. 

 and when I felt a presence sit next to me in my room, I knew it wasn’t holy. It did not give me peace. It taunted me and called me ‘price-less’, again. I was in a box, and I was not alone. I had long forgotten how to pray, all I did was cry, but my groanings I thought I hid from God, I believed that if He heard me it would irritate Him, at least that’s what the presence told me.

I began to call out for help when the remorse began melt into numbness. Pastor Emi at chapel once made us write anonymous letters to him as confessions, yet when he called out the case without the specifics the next Sunday and asked that the student see him, even though something tugged at my heart and I knew that could be redemption, I left the church once we shared grace, and did not look back.

 That was the last time I left my room on a Sunday morning.

It all blew up in my face when I offered myself to Damien on a platter of gold, one evening and he spat in my face. 

“Expired goods.” The venom that rolled off his tongue burned every fiber of my being. I wanted him dead. At all costs. 

But I feared that if anything as much as brushed his heel, it would ruin me. Just as he already had, but his ruin intertwined my soul with his, the strings of blood we formed in the forbidden union, was responsible for the horrid dreams that haunted me even when I was yet awake. 

The red strings that surrounded the little grape sized foetus he forced me to flush down the drain while I sobbed on the cold bathroom tiles in the background, whispering “my baby.”

I had become him, and that was all I needed to be condemned.

My spirit was now so quiet. I had never felt it this distanced from my soul. The foreign body inhabiting my soul had intimidated my spirit. 

Some weeks later, a girl I used to think was such a hypocrite for attending parties on Saturdays till the dawn of the sabbath and end up showing up for communion by 8:00 am, walked up to me and whispered, “church girl, didn’t see you at church today when your boyfriend went for altar call.” Yes, that was all she came for. As she swayed her hips from side to side and I watched her figure retreat, until she was gone, I stood there stunned. 

There was no way God would forgive him right? After all, Jesus did say in Matthew 18:6 that whoever causes one of the little ones who believe in Him to sin, it would be better for him to have a great milestone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. In my imperfect judgement, that was what he deserved. 

Oh there’s way my darling! In my denial I knew that maybe Damien really didn’t know the gravity of what he was doing to me and to himself, and maybe that’s why he could go to God. He didn’t know as much as I did, and that’s why I found it hard to forgive myself. And in that space, I found it hard, to forgive God. As irrelevant as I am before God, I felt that my resentment anytime I saw Damien preaching during evangelism to the Muslims around campus, hurt God.  

In my anger and in the midst of my agony, the evening that it rained, and the clouds were misty and cold, I knew that I was no longer part of the 99, but that light that led me to the chapel once again, was my Jesus, calling out to me, the prodigal. I still do not know how my feet carried my weight, cause all that was left were my remains. 

I had suffered great loss. I had been tortured by sin. Demons danced around my head, reminding that my purity was gone, that I now lived a lie, I was an adulterer, I had murdered my own, but even in all of that, I am glad that I reached out to my God, whose hand had indeed always been stretched out for mine. 

He pulled me up to the surface of His waters, and taught me what it was to truly love, it was to be vulnerable with God, something I thought I had been until I hit rock bottom. 

It was to believe that I was loved.

That that past of thorns, once I loved Him, he turned them into lilies, the prettiest of them. There is nothing that my God cannot do.

And I stand on that because the next Sunday after my encounter, when I just so happened to be sat next to Damien, and I watched him worship, in Spirit and Truth, I didn’t want to stab anymore, but I was glad, that he had found the Fountain of Life. It is truly something to die for.

The red strings, became scarlet threads, interwoven indeed to create a masterpiece, and guess who did the knitting. 

I am forgiven, So I shall forgive. 

 The end.

With love, 

The stray.