Insight of a Kenyan Girl

He called me.
Not when I was bleeding.
Not when I was being rushed through sterile hospital corridors with a body threatening to betray itself.
Not when my hands trembled as they wheeled me away for emergency surgery.
He called after.

After the silence.
After the storm had almost swallowed me.
After someone else told him what I went through.
After I survived it—alone.

He didn’t ask if I was okay.
He said,
“It was my baby too.”

As if words stitch back what had been torn.
As if he deserved a piece of something he never stood beside.
As if his name on the pain made it noble.

And then—so carelessly, so cruelly—he said,
“Anyway, it’s not the end of the world.”

Not for him.
Never for him.

He didn’t wake up with stitches across his skin and silence across his soul.
He didn’t whisper into hospital pillows, afraid he wouldn’t wake up at all.
He didn’t press shaking hands against his belly, feeling the ghost of something that never got to be born.

He didn’t sit through the diagnosis of an ectopic pregnancy, hearing the doctor’s voice blur into static.
He didn’t cry as nurses held his hand before anesthesia took everything under.

He didn’t lose anything.

But I did.
I lost more than blood.
More than a child I never got to meet.
I lost faith in the people who said they loved me—and vanished.

He asked why I didn’t tell him.
Then said,
“When did you reach out and I didn’t pick up?”

As if the absence had been mine.
As if silence was something I had created—not endured.

I didn’t reach out.
Because I knew what would happen:
Nothing.
Nothing would come of my pain in his hands.
He would have folded it.
Dismissed it.
Tossed it aside like it wasn’t wrapped in flesh and fear and loss.

When I finally told him I was broke, barely scraping by,
he sent me sixty-five dollars.

Not even a message.
Just a number on a screen.
A transaction.
A placeholder where love should’ve lived.

And still—he said,
“I care.”

That word. So empty in his mouth.
So brittle.
So painfully late.

My parents found out too.
They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t hold me.
They just… changed.
I became a whisper in my own home.
The daughter who disappointed.
The story they didn’t want to explain.

No one asked how I paid the bills.
No one noticed the quiet unraveling.

But I did.
I noticed.
I paid.

$1,936 in medical debt.
Years of savings gone in a week.
And not a single hand to hold through it.

He texted me again, a few days later.
“Maybe when I’m in your town, I’ll look for you.”

No.
You won’t.

You don’t get to find me in this new world I’ve built from scratch.
You don’t get to walk into the ruins and pretend to mourn what you let die.
You don’t get to touch the strength I grew in your absence.

The girl who waited for you?
She’s gone.
She bled. She broke.
And then—she became something else.
Something unrecognizable to the man who never saw her in the first place.

I don’t want your messages.
I don’t want your crumbs of care.
I don’t want anything you offer now that the cost has already been paid in full—by me.

So no, Callum, it’s not the end of the world.

But it was the end of you in mine.

I’m closing this door.
Not with bitterness.
But with finality.

Click.
Lock.
Silence.

You will not be written into my next chapter.
And there will be no key waiting under the mat.