At five in the morning, when the city was still breathing silence, violence burst into my life with a brutality that left no room for doubt or hope.
The bedroom door slammed against the wall with a dry crash, as if announcing the beginning of something that had been brewing in the darkness for too long.
No photo description available.
Victor saw me as a person, as a problem, as an obstacle, as something that should be corrected with shouts and control.
—“Get up, you useless cow!”— he shouted, tearing off the sheets, reducing my humanity to a word that hurt more than any physical blow.
I was six months pregnant, but at that moment, my body was not a refuge of life, but a battlefield where fear and survival fought without respite.
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.
