All of a sudden, a car closed in on me, and I fell off my bike.
One of my knees hurt. I decided to walk back to the starting point.
I left the bike with them and turned back.
That’s when the comments started.
“You fell down, sweetheart? I wish I were that bike.”

I was on top of him. I’d just come. He wasn’t inside me.
I was reaching for the condoms when he forced himself inside me, holding me down by the hips. I closed my eyes and waited for him to finish.
Something was wrong.
domestic violence, gender violence, sexual violence, marital rape, marriage, divorce

I used to work in a landline service store that opened on Fridays.
I would go down to the store on Fridays alone.
All of the other nearby stores would be closed that day and the store where I worked was in a narrow passageway with a dead end.

Before it happened,
I raised my voice and fought with you,
So you wouldn’t get into the elevator with me.
I went in alone,
And you pushed the door and came in,
And reached out and touched me.

I never physically harassed a woman.
When I would like a girl, I would go speak to her.
It satisfied my ego.
That was until I saw a girl being harassed in the street.

It was 9 pm on a Thursday.
My mother gave money and sent me to buy a box of tissues.
Three guys appeared.
One of them was holding a knife.
He pressed it to my cheek and told me to walk without saying a word.
They took me to a strange area and called out to another guy to join them.
Then they took me to a warehouse and raped me,
One after the other.
gender violence; sexual violence; rape; parents; social pressure

When I was in middle school, I went to a school in Al Mandara, and there was a girls' school across the street from ours. We used to finish school at the same time.

When I first started wearing those pants,
The way people looked at me changed.

I saw a 7-year-old boy physically harassing a girl.
I was confused.
How did the boy know which parts of the woman’s body
to touch?
How? He’s only seven!

When I was 6,
My mother took me out.
She told me that we were going to visit someone,
But she didn't take me back home with her.
She left me there.