Wouldn't Have Gone With Him

I was in kindergarten,
My mom had sent me to get her something from the supermarket.
I was walking by a mosque.
I found someone getting out of a taxi, and calling for me.
I went.

“I want you to go to this apartment,” he said,
pointing at the building next to the mosque.
“Knock at their door.”
And I can’t remember what he asked me to tell them.

“Which apartment?” I asked.
“Come here, I’ll show you” he said.
He picked me up and carried me,
And pointed from the window of the building to the apartment in the opposite building.
“That one” he said,
I told him I couldn’t see it.

He put me down.
All this time he had been carrying me,
And grinding his lower body against mine.
I didn’t understand what was happening.
But I was scared to tell my mother because I didn’t want her to shout at me,
Because she had warned me several times about talking to strangers.


When I grew up a little.
I realised that had been child molestation.
If only my mother had explained why she had warned me,
And what could have happened to me,
I certainly wouldn’t have gone.

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