I’m still living my story.
It started when baba made me break off my engagement,
To the man I loved,
Because they had a disagreement.
“God will be pleased with you,
Because you’re doing as I say,” he told me.

I have always been overweight,
And my family comments about my body all the time.
I used to feel like I was public property,
That anyone could look at me and my body and call me,
“Fat” or “chubby”.
I was the butt of jokes at family gatherings,
Which I hated more than anything.
body image, beauty standards, bullying, marriage

Because she wanted her own place.
She wanted to live.
That’s what a marriage contract was to her: freedom.

Don’t shame us.
Do you understand? Don’t you understand?
The towels.
The sheets.

Unlike most girls, I never had any expectations or dreams about my wedding night. Nor did I exert any effort to think of what would happen once I was alone with my husband—whom I hardly knew—for the first time.

“Are you a virgin?”
She lied and said that she wasn’t.
Just so they’d let her marry a friend of hers.
She didn’t love him, but they’re friends.
He understands her situation,
And wants to help her move out of her parents’ house.

I want to be free.
I want to write whatever I want.
But all married women now have red lines they can’t cross.
“Now that we live together, you have to forget about writing,”
They’re told as soon as they get married.

I decided not to have any contact with men when I was 17 years old.
Some people told me, “You’ve become too conservative.”
While others told me, “May God bless you.”
And a lot of my friends stopped talking to me altogether.
But no one told me how to deal with my fiance.