The year is 2018

I didn't know it then, but 2018 was the year my life started to spiral. It wasn't a big bang. No. It was a quiet whisper—a decision my mother made that would turn everything upside down. But let's look at 2016. I'm in the village with my grandma, naïve and a teenage with puberty.

As an African mother, when a child starts acting out—doing strange, unnatural things—you don't think "adolescence." You think "witchcraft." That's what my mother thought when I started feeling the sharp pain in my chest every time dinner rolled around. Heart pain, she thought. But now? Looking back, I know it wasn't heartache. It wasn't some curse. It was adrenaline—or maybe just a craving for attention. Because when I was a child, the only time I ever got attention was when I aced an exam or came first in class.

That was my currency. That was how I earned love. For a day or two. Then everything went back to normal—the silence. The empty moments. The dry spells where I just existed, unnoticed. So, I faked sickness. Ached for a little attention.

In 2017, I was in Grade 7. A teenager. Old enough to know better, but I didn't. Because I was never given the "talk." Not the one that most kids get when they hit puberty. When I got my period, all my mom had to say was, "You're no longer a young girl. You're grown now. Don't let boys touch you. Don't play with boys." And that was it. That was the talk. No one asked how I felt about it. No one cared about the fear or the confusion or the loneliness that came with it.

I was still in the village, still naïve, still looking for something real. And then it happened. A Grade 9 boy—popular, cute—asked me out. No thought. Just yes. Because in that moment, being asked out by him felt like being chosen by royalty. Like a king had just asked me to be his queen.

He wasn't a good guy. He was a player. A boy with a dozen girlfriends, all of them just passing time. I knew that, but I didn't care. He was my first. The first to ask me out. The first to make me feel wanted.

At school, I wasn't anything special. I was the ugly nerd. The fat, tomboyish kid. No one had ever looked at me and said, "She's beautiful" or "She's smart." But here he was, the most popular guy in school, asking me out. I dropped everything for him. I snuck out at night to meet him. He was the first to kiss me, but not the first to take my virginity—that had been stolen long before I even knew what it meant.

I was 6 when I lost that piece of me. And no one cared. No one even noticed.