I tried to sit up, but the pain in my back and the weight in my belly reminded me that every movement was a negotiation with suffering.
—“It hurts… I can’t move fast”— I whispered, my voice breaking, waiting for the slightest sign of empathy that finally arrived.
He laughed, and that laugh was worse than any insult, because it was devoid of humanity, full of learned contempt.
—“Other women suffer and don’t complain”— she replied, as if pain were a competition and I was deliberately losing.
I went down the stairs leaning against the wall, each step a humiliation, each breath a struggle to keep my feet up because of the baby I was carrying inside.
In the kitchen, the scene was even more devastating than the physical violence: it was the normalization of cruelty.
