Her lips are red, like glowing charcoal.

She resembles a wild cat that has dipped its mouth in void. Her mouth like raw yaws. It looks like an open ulcer. Like the mouth of a friend. She feels alone. And it’s that time she judges herself harshly. Her hair, she doesn’t like it straight, or curled. Maybe she likes it up, like thorns. They call it afro sometimes. She likes afros. She also likes sexy red lipstick, but tonight, it’s the wild cat and the thorns.

It’s one of those days when she feels like nothing. She breathes standing against the wall letting her negativity consume her.

“Do people really know how one word, one statement can surely stick with you?”

People just say things casually, but days like this, all the negative things said casually haunt her, for hours. She remembers the tone, and the smirk on the face of the person who said her hair looked like thorns. She also remembered the wild cat. Maybe she is a wild cat. She is wild. Every wild woman wears red lippie, or that’s what she assumes.

She takes zero offence on the wild part. But she is not a cat at all. She doesn’t even like cats.

It is these statements that haunt her. The people who say them have no idea how much it means. It’s these statements that haunt her during her saddest days. Especially during those lonely hours of raining nights. At three o’clock, the words keep coming back to her head. Repeating themselves. “You aren’t beautiful enough. You’re fat. You’re disgusting. Your hair looks like thorns.”

She wipes a tear. She overdosed on some pills, she can’t remember what they are for. She just wants to numb the pain, yet again. The words come with headaches and her marks of cuttings of razor blades remind her how disgusting she really is. Maybe they are right. She swallows a bunch of pills again. Maybe, just maybe, the pain will go away someday. She whispers, “Or the pain will take me someday.”

And then she closes her eyes, she falls asleep on the floor.

_

Gloria Nyagaka is Kenyan and just completed her Bachelor's degree in Geology.

She has been a writer for six years now. Her manuscript is the biggest project she’s ever done, a modern romantic thriller, is in the hands of her literary agent. It is a book that expresses great female characters and the strength of a woman at large. She mostly campaigns against women violence and for freedom for women to choose. She also focuses on how great women have changed the world, Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others. She is a swimmer, a swim coach, a Taekwondoka, hockey player, and a dancer.