GIRLS, WHATS WRONG WITH YOU?

Girls, what is wrong with you
 

Sobs wrack her body. He stands watch.

Silently she cries herself to sleep.  Sleep haunted by dreams of fear, self-doubt and misery. The neighbor’s cannot learn of this. After all aren’t they the newly wed couple that is oozing all of little chubby cupid’s blessings? He finally relents and pours himself a drink from the scant remains at the bottom of the bottle. He throws the bottle at the far end of the room where it shatters on the wall and startles her wake. She tries to make herself as small as possible wrapping the blankets around her, sneakily moving away to the farthest end of the bed her fears awakened.

“Moseti…sobs… please come to my house,…sob… please…sob… please,” a plea from a sobbing girl at two am in the morning.

"Hey, whats the matter?" I ask as I rub sleep away from my eyes, I look at the phone again and realize its Mo.

“Just come over, I am hurt.” She says between sobs.

I am bewildered, what could have happened this time round? Many a time I’ve lent my shoulder to be cried on but this seems different.

“what is the matter?” I finally ask?

“Its that Bastard Kim!” Her sobs are forgotten as she hurls out these words like some disgusting offal she wants to spit out of her mouth.

When I get there, she has a gash across her shoulder from which blood is seeping out from beneath the face towel she has held to the wound to try and stem the bleeding. Thank God she is not queasy as at the amount of blood.  Kim has hit her with a gas cooker stand. The kind that is used on the 6kg gas cylinder. Kim is not around when I get there. I probably could have gotten physical with him had I chanced on him. At the hospital, she doesn’t want to press charges. She tells the doctor that she fell in the bathroom. The doctor clearly does not believe her and keeps shooting me this evil look like he is convinced I am the perpetrator.

A day later I find Kim and Mo sipping coffee in one of the restaurants I frequent, laughing gaily and looking like the happiest couple in the world. I go over say hi and ask about her shoulder, Mo smiles guiltily as she tells e she is healing.
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Zippy is pregnant. She is pregnant with the same guy she swore of leaving. The same guy she spent hours telling me how much he was stifling her. Hours spent tucked away in my room high will youthful defiance. When she was looking for an escape channel from the enclosed capsule in which she was being suffocated. Watched like a hawk, all her movements questioned, all her interactions interrogated. I once asked her why she still stuck there. I understood her response and at the same time pitied her. She was in the relationship because the guy paid her rent and sustained her pocket whims and fancies. She however swore to leave once she finished campus. She was year ahead of me. That was last year. Now she has graduated and she is pregnant. She cannot even bring herself to face me. It has been five months since we last saw each other. I was wondering about the black out when I found out she is in the family way with the guy when I bumped into her in town. Her dreams of flying out of the country have either been put on hold or done away with, who knows? 

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In my first year of campus, she was the talk of town. That ethereal flower that everyone coveted. Petite with a Somali body and the curves of a Luo.  Before long, this guy snatched her up. Then the stories started floating around, stories I brushed off as jealous male type stories meant to backbite the guy. Until I saw him slap her at nightclub. I watched flabbergasted, bottle frozen in my hand and mouth wide open. Then I spoke to his roommate and the things I heard. Oh, God! Poor child! 
Where is the self esteem when you walk in on your man having sex with another lady, he tells you wait outside while he finishes up then he asks you to sit and wait for him as he escorts away his ‘mpango wa kando’? Where is the pride and what does that guy have that whenever you want sex you have to buy him a bottle of vodka first? This is the same chic that men could have gone down on their knees for in first year.

Ladies, what is it that makes you stick to abusive relationships?!