I wake up screaming for the third time this week. My sheets are drenched in sweat and my body is shivering like a leaf. My breath comes in short painful busts and for a moment, I am convinced that I am going to suffocate and die. These nightmares will be the end of me and maybe it’s not a bad thing.
I lay back down and roll over to the other side. I catch a glimpse of the wall behind me. Where others have a headboard, I have a wall of certificates from my long and arduous journey across the globe in such of education, something to validate, me an attempt to replace what was taken from me years ago.
Somewhere up there is my Valedictorian speech given on my graduation last year from the Yale School of Medicine alongside other certificates awarded to the most outstanding student in the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology-me. It still sounds incredulous. Sometimes, I don’t know if I wanted to become a doctor. I just let my anger and feelings of betrayal fuel me. They still do and I am determined to attain the highest honour there is. Somewhere up there is an invitation letter for a residency at the Jons Hopkins hospital. My plane leaves tomorrow. I know it’s crazy that the letter is still strung up there, but I will pull it down when I need to leave, along with all the other accolades.
I came home to relax and reconnect with my roots after 16 years of living abroad. For some reason, being home brought all the memories I had blocked away flooding into my mind like an avalanche. Of my mother and aunt holding my legs worlds apart as the old haggard looking woman tore away my womanhood with a stained blade. For a long time, my mind blocked away her face but of late, I remember her. I remember her callous hands on my flesh, her red eyes burning with determination the movement of the blade on my flesh… I don’t know why the memories came back. Maybe because I came home, or because my wedding is in a month. How do I tell my love that those women took away everything that makes me a woman or that their actions cost me my uterus and I can never have children? How?