My first draft life story ..

Still Here

A Memoir by me

There are people who are born into arms that hold them. I was not one of those people.

I came into the world between two people who loved each other the way fire loves wood consuming, destroying, never still. My mother and father lived in a cycle of drugs, alcohol, and violence that neither of them seemed to know how to break. I did not choose to be born into it. No child does. But I was there, small and helpless, watching the walls shake.

My mother left first. She did not leave quietly. She simply ran to another man, another life and I was left behind with my father. I don't know how long it was before she came back, but she did come back. She found me at preschool in Clermont, Johannesburg, and took me by the hand. We walked. Not to a car, not to a bus we walked from Johannesburg to Pretoria, a small child and a mother who had decided to start over. I wonder sometimes what that walk felt like to her. I only know what it made me: a child who understood, very early, that the ground beneath him could shift without warning.

They reunited. The violence continued.

One day I was not yet two years old they left the house on one of their highs and did not come back. I cried until I couldn't cry anymore. There was no food. There was nobody. After a few days, the neighbours grew worried enough to call social services. Warnings were issued. It happened again. And again. On the third time, they took me away.

I don't remember all of it clearly I was too young for that but I remember the woman at the care facility who bathed me and held me like I was hers. She was the first person who made me feel like I might be worth something.

Then a foster family came. They visited, they smiled, they decided they wanted me.

I screamed the entire way to their house. Screamed so hard that my mouth split open and blood ran down my face. My small body understood something my mind could not yet form into words: I cannot survive being taken again.

When we arrived, the terror did not stop. For weeks, if a stranger climbed over the fence, I would fall apart certain they had come to move me somewhere else. Certain the ground was shifting again.

The foster mother had wanted a child for a long time. She had lost two pregnancies. Then, around the time they took me in, she discovered she was pregnant. The family had a decision to make: do they keep the strange, screaming, traumatised little boy, or do they let him go now that their own child was coming?

They kept me.

I wish I could tell you that was the beginning of safety. It was not.

My foster father was a hard man. Not hard the way wood is hard solid, reliable. Hard the way glass is hard: cold, sharp when it breaks, capable of cutting deep.

He beat me. He threatened to kill me. He told me, more than once, that I was a shit stain on the earth. He said he deeply regretted adopting me. He told me there was something profoundly wrong with me, and that he was not wrong.

He made me promise not to tell my mother about our conversations.

My foster mother knew. She saw some of it. But they had their own son, and three daughters, and five children is a lot of noise, a lot of need and I think she chose peace in the way exhausted people sometimes do. I do not know if I blame her. I have spent many years not knowing.

What I do know is that I developed something strange during those years. An escape. I would drift into a kind of waking dream arms waving, body moving so deep inside my own mind that I sometimes lost control of my body entirely. It was embarrassing. It was my only refuge. The mind does what it must when the world outside offers nothing safe.

School was its own war.

I was short. I was different. I walked the halls alone and picked up litter during recess because the teachers gave out validation cards for it, and validation even the cheap, printed kind was something I had learned to collect. I talked to God in the quiet moments between classes. I'm not sure He always answered, but the talking helped.

Then high school arrived, and something shifted. I became popular. I don't fully understand how it happened these things rarely announce themselves. But the boy who had walked alone suddenly had people around him.

At home, it got worse.

My foster father's hatred sharpened as I grew older. As if my becoming a person having friends, having a life was an insult to him. He broke me down in the private spaces of that house, away from witnesses, away from the world that was starting to see something in me that he refused to see.

When I was eighteen, he gave my mother a choice: I leave, or he does.

I left.

I rented a room. The landlady raised the price after three months and threw me out.

I found a girlfriend. We moved in together. We lasted four years. Then she packed my things and put them outside, and that was that.

My boss at the time a man fifteen years older than me, someone I considered a genuine friend said I could stay with him. I was grateful. I moved in. For six months it was fine, mostly fine, except for comments I told myself not to read too deeply.

Then one evening he put something in my tea.

I felt it hit me a heaviness I could not fight and I fell onto my bed. When I woke up, he was there. He was doing things I had not agreed to. I was paralysed. Not just by whatever he had given me, but by terror, by disbelief, by the sickening gap between who I thought he was and what was happening.

He stumbled and ran.

I lay there staring at the ceiling, telling myself: this is real. You are in danger.

I messaged a friend. He came and got me.

When I told my supervisor at work what had happened, she asked me if I was perhaps gay.

I left that job. I left that world. I tried to disappear the memory into a place I didn't have to look at.

I met my wife not long after.

She was warm. She was studying to become a teacher. I believed her completely — I had not yet learned that belief could be weaponised.

We dated. We fought. I drank. We fought more. That part was not her fault alone.

After about a year she told me she had received her teaching qualification and had applied for a position. She got it. She taught for nearly three years. Then her school sent a group of teachers to register at SAIS.

I got a phone call.

She had been arrested.

When she finally called me herself, she told me it was all true. She had forged her qualification. She had never earned the degree. Three years of a life we had built together rested on a document she had fabricated.

I got a lawyer. I paid thousands I did not have. I watched her cry and I fought for her anyway because that is what I do, apparently. I fight for people who have already decided how this ends.

Two years of court appearances. A suspended sentence of ten years. She found another school, told them about her criminal record, and they accepted her anyway.

We sold everything we owned to emigrate to America. A new life. A real beginning.

One morning she was on her way to work.

She blocked me on everything. Every platform, every number. Gone.

The same day, my foster mother and brother called me.

Rehab, they said. Or the street.

So here I am. Four months in a rehabilitation centre. Writing this. Alive, which still surprises me some days.

I have been abandoned by my mother. Threatened by my father. beaten by the man who chose to raise me. Violated by someone I trusted. Deceived by the woman I married. Left, repeatedly, by nearly everyone who said they would stay.

And yet.

There is something in me that has refused, every single time, to become nothing. I do not know what to call it. Stubbornness, maybe. Or stupidity. Or something that looks, from certain angles, like hope.

I am still here.

That has to mean something.

I just haven't figured out what yet.

This is my story. It is not finished.