Chapter 42 - Chapter 42: Nothing Local

My heart aches for Zondi. The things people have been saying about him are so hard to read. Just because he's a famous athlete doesn't mean he isn't a human being. It doesn't mean he can't be hurt.

All day the internet has been picking him apart and confirming the thing he's most afraid of — that supporters won't love him once they find out there's more to him than the troublemaker off the back page.

Thankfully, by now, I think he knows that isn't true.

The comments about Zondi are hurtful about him as a footballer. The ones aimed at me are disgustingly cruel and they're purely about my body.

These people don't know me. They don't even know what I look like. All they saw was my shape under a coat, but because my boyfriend is well known they've decided they're allowed to shame it for not matching the women they were used to seeing him with.

I'm not going to lie. It hurts.

The words are ones I've been saying to myself for years. They're the ones my mother has thought and never said out loud, and the ones her friends' daughters have thought and never said out loud either. But when tens of thousands of strangers repeat the exact thoughts you've been working so hard to clear out of your head, those words set like cement. They find every crack. They settle in. They get into everything.