Fragmented
written by: S. Rin
There has been a turmoil planted in me since I was 5—a knot in my chest, growing heavier with each passing year, deeper with every secret I was forced to carry. It all started when my eldest brother married her—the woman who would eventually become the harbinger of my undoing. She taught me early how to keep secrets. I was a child, barely out of infancy, yet she made me her confidante. I was told that if I did the dishes and kept quiet, I could have coffee—warm, bitter, and strangely adult. It was a small trade for a small soul, but the price of silence was far greater than I could understand.
Her secrets were strange, darker than I knew how to process. They began with the simplicity of her smoking habit. Later, they grew. My home, once an extension of my shadowplays, became a strange theatre of human failings—people in and out, secrets exchanged in hushed tones, while I stood at the periphery, an unwilling witness to lives lived at the margins.
She taught me words no child should ever repeat. Words from the mouths of her friends with empty eyes and empty bottles, words that crawled under my skin and stayed there, long after the adults had left. “Don’t tell anyone,” she would say. “No one will believe you. If you do, you’ll be hurt.”
When my second brother married, the world of secrets darkened even further. He was young, just nineteen, promised to a girl who would read me stories, whose family later donated blood for my mother’s survival; yet he married a woman older than him by a few years—a woman whose history was marked by a legacy of survival in the world’s oldest trade. A prostitute. He impregnated her and she claimed to love him, but no woman who truly loves a boy so young, so full of possibility, would ever ask him to sacrifice that life for something as broken as what they had created out of recklessness. She, too, carried her own buried stories, but as time passed, I learned that honesty was a language she never truly spoke. With each truth uncovered, my brother’s sense of betrayal deepened. She wore the mantle of victimhood with such precision, twisting the narrative until it bore no trace of the truth. Even now, she seeks refuge in my family’s empathy, only to weaponize it later, casting my brother as the villain in a story where she assumes the role of the innocent martyr. She forgets that she, too, helped build the foundation of their world—one forged from choices they both made. Yet, she now dons the guise of someone who never willingly entered the story at all. And as the web of deceit grew, so did the chasm between them, filled with the sharp, haunting echoes of trust shattered, reflected in the cheating, the neglect, the quiet unraveling of a life once shared.
It was at eight that I saw things I was never meant to see. Again. A naked body, unashamed, unfurling in front of me. Her thong, her movements—both so foreign to my child’s mind. I felt discomfort creep in, but I had no words for it, only a strange, silent awareness that the world was not as it seemed. My little brother, just a year older than me, felt it too. But no one spoke of it.
By twelve, the lines blurred even further. My first sister-in-law would take me on late-night rides across the city, using me as her alibi while she sought out the men she had drawn in with her charm and fake name. I’d sit shivering in the passenger seat, phone in my hand, quietly sending my location to friends just in case the night turned dangerous. She would introduce me to these strangers as if we were the same age—being tall made it easy to believe.
And after every ride, there was always the same shadowed warning, the same threat to keep quiet. And then, as if to twist the knife, my brothers would ask me why I couldn’t be more like my sisters-in-law. Like them? Like how? Was I meant to learn the art of living two lives, smiling sweetly in daylight while slipping into secrecy at night? Was I meant to mirror the duplicity they had welcomed into our home, wear it like a badge, call it womanhood?
I was ashamed of being a woman—ashamed of what they showed me a woman was, even though I was not yet one.
The tension between my two sisters-in-law was palpable, thick as smoke. They didn’t just clash; they destroyed each other in small, subtle ways. And I, the unwitting messenger, was caught in their crossfire. One would whisper venomous words about the other, calling her out for seeing more penises than she could count—as if this were some twisted metric of worth. The elder sister-in-law spoke these words, not with malice, but with a kind of broken pride—her body, her history, her experience, all laid bare in an unforgiving light. She showed me what I had not yet understood, defining it with grotesque demonstrations that erased whatever innocence had lingered.
In my home, love was not a language anyone spoke anymore. It was a landscape of survival, where vagabonds gathered for warmth but never found it. My house became a playground for the lost, the ashamed, the unwanted, and I was both their keeper and their captive. Each secret was a chain around my soul; each whispered threat a shackle that clamped tighter with time. “Tell them,” they warned me, “and no one will believe you.” And I knew they were right.
The men I called brothers were not the ones I thought they were. They had been forged in a crucible of neglect and violence. Their stepfather, a man whose cruelty twisted their lives, my father, had stolen something from them too. Yet, none of them married a woman who could look at them and see them as they were meant to be—men worthy of love, not simply bodies and wallets to be used. The circumstances of their lives, the ways they were tortured by forces beyond their control, went unnoticed, unacknowledged. No one ever cared to see.
What gnawed at me more than the secrets, more than the words whispered into the dark, was this: I wanted to put it all somewhere, to lay it down somewhere safe, to free myself from the weight of it. But when I tried to speak, when the words began to form on the tip of my tongue, my brothers would look at me and say, “Don’t disobey our wives.” As if I were not of their blood, as if they did not carry me when I was two.
And the wives—oh, the wives—would only wink at me. A wink that carried more than I could bear. A wink that said, “See? We have control. You’re nothing but a bystander.” It was the kind of look that could kill a part of you without ever needing to say a word.
In that silence, my heart grew heavy with resentment. I began to loathe my brothers—not in the way a child might hate, but in a way that was colder, more calculated. It was the kind of dislike that grows from betrayal, from the realization that the people you trusted most had chosen to abandon you for the sake of comfort, for the sake of their own fragile peace. The love that should have bound us together was replaced by a web of manipulation and hypocrisy that they invited into our home, cloaking their lives with the veil of propriety, while all I could see were the cracks beneath the surface.
What crushed me most was the lie of it all. The pretense that they held these marriages, these relationships, as if they were symbols of something pure—when all I could see were the threads of their unraveling. It wasn’t just about the things they allowed to happen behind closed doors; it was about how they turned away from me, from the truth, from everything that once made us siblings, and instead chose to uphold the facade of a family that never was.
I remember, with aching clarity, the days before it all went wrong. The days when we were children. We used to fly kites, our hands gripping the strings as we let the wind carry them higher and higher. It was a time before their choices came to define us, before they tangled themselves in relationships and lies. A time when we still had the joy of simply being children, of looking up at the sky and knowing that anything was possible.
But as I grew older, I watched as those kites fell to the ground, caught in the tangled mess of their decisions, their ignorance, their inability to see what was before them. And in the wreckage, I was left with a bitter understanding—that the world we had once shared was gone, lost to time, lost to choices made by hands other than mine.
Adonai, in His justice, has given daughters to each. And in the way of the world, some will become echoes of their mothers, repeating the same patterns. Others will find themselves tangled in relationships with men who will teach them lessons too heavy to bear. Lessons that will, in turn, force their mothers to experience the sting of betrayal, of hurt, of seeing what it’s like when love is weaponized. It is inevitable—a cruel inheritance, passed down like a sacred curse.
Yet, what can a woman of such caliber do but lay the blame at her husband’s feet, or perhaps at the genes that shaped him, rather than utter the words that could shatter the very foundation of her pride: “I should have been better. I should have seen the cycle for what it was, and broken it, not let it grow wild, unchecked.”
I refuse to grant those who walk this path the same reverence we reserve for mothers. Bearing a child does not make you a mother, no more than sharing a bed with the same man makes you a wife. Motherhood, wifehood—these titles are claimed, earned only when the ego is swallowed whole, when the worship of a man, so desperate and consuming, fades into the shadows. Only then can you look him in the eye, not to villainize him, not to make him the scapegoat for your own unspoken choices, but to accept, in the truest sense, this is the man I chose to give myself to. And it’s there, in that acceptance, that the sacrifice is made so deep, so complete, that it feels as if you might die—only to be reborn again. A sacrifice that doesn’t demand accolades, but reverence, because in that moment, you’ve transcended the cycles, the wounds, and you’ve chosen love—not as a weapon, but as a life raft, fragile but certain.
And if I could wish anything for the boys I once played with—the ones who flew kites with dirt-stained hands and laughter in their lungs—it would be this: that each of them becomes the man he once dreamed of being. A musician. A web designer. Whatever it was, those dreams were simple once. Pure. Achievable. Far easier than the twisted roles they chose instead—the hollow performances they now carry out in bedrooms, on the road, and behind closed doors, wearing masks so tight they’ve forgotten the shape of their own faces.
Because whatever darkness they’ve stepped into, whatever identities they’ve forged from survival and silence, were never part of the plan. Not when we were young. Not when they still believed in the possibility of becoming something more than what they came from. And that’s what stays with me—the unbearable truth that the things they wanted were never out of reach… until they decided to reach for something else entirely.
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