I held on to the grills that barred my bedroom window from the inside, peeking out at the sunny day. The chirping of newly hatched chickens and the commanding cluck of the mother hen drowned in the background as the powerful sound of large trucks racing on the nearby main route dulled it.
I was a mad woman. I threw a sidelong glance at my wardrobe mirror to stare into the face of me. To see me, I believe, as others have seen me. Sometimes I didn't like what I see. It's a tragedy that I could not move in this body that I was born into without unease. The woman I believe myself to be and the one staring at me in the mirror were inalienable. Dre only saw the one in the mirror.
A twittering of birds lulled me back to the present. My eyes scanned the trees for the beautiful plumage of the fowl of the air from my backdoor that led into the concave of a hill.
I glanced at the manuscript- two hundred thousand words and counting. I've excluded so many chapters and unfinished parts when I was so steeped in despair that trying to write my way out of this heartache didn't provide the catharsis I needed.
This book is big. I thought about putting it into series, changing the font, utilising a smaller font size as well, in order that, this tale that signalled another turning point in my life could be available in one dusk jacket stack of bonded papers.
I smile at rows of banana trees, coconut trees with finger like leaves in colours of yellow, brown and green. The flesh beside my nose twitched, my eyes squinted and my dark brown lips pursed into a thin line. I rocked as if I was in a music video and oozing the confidence of video vixen. I was a mad woman. Dre's name felt like sawdust in my mouth.
I pulled a star shaped pair of ash-gold coloured earrings from my chest of drawers and put them on. Playing ‘dressed up’ worked wonders for my self-esteem. I added make up, a smearing of the cherry red lipstick, a most figure flattering under wear and then I slipped into my little black dress and sat before my laptop.
Love, literatures… most enduring muse.
When I started this story, it was about love and then it became about Dre, then about me and now, it's about women, relationships and self-esteem.
Saf was my literature magpie. I had collected parts of her while I milled around in my sorrow and my pregnancy hormones wreaked havoc on my personality. When some days, I walked around like a Jamaican ‘madda woman’ with two pencils stuck in my wrapped head wear, popularly known as a "tie head", ideas racing in my mind as fast as Usain Bolt.
Those were the days when Saf, my alter ego, and I felt like walking up Cerasee Road- butt naked, chattering gibberish and hollering out Dre's name. I'd sit and imagined it with my wanton imagination, the pot holes in the road filled with water, the women sprawling out on their verandas the faces of the Dre's legions of fans, the laughter of the young boys and Dre chasing me away in anger and embarrassment. I'd laugh to myself and begin to write again. Dre would never live long enough to see that happen.
I didn't love Dre. I hadn't loved him for a long time. The honeymoon wore off around the second month after he all but dried up with me when I didn't buy him a new pair of Clarkes. I, the literature major, missed the symbolism. He already had a perfectly good pair, yet he made me buy him a new one then he sold the old pair.
It was the beginning of our relationship and the grandest metaphor yet. Dre would turn away a good woman for the prospect of a new one. The metaphor expands for just as I had never seen Dre in that shoe, not once, so too I would do things for him that I will never reap nor benefit of it in the future. So it was in the beginning. So it shall be in the end.
I wept bitterly, my fingers trembled and I sat before my laptop to complete this story, blinking away tears, humming a soft tune and shaking my head in despair. I wished I’d never met him. He had scarred my life in a way that I had to rethink my entire modus operandi.
I scoffed; Dre said if I thought he would settle for me, Dre! I would have settled for him. I made a mirthless laugh.
This was my orchestra of life - my red lips, my dark curly hair on my shoulders, my round bottom on a stool like Alicia Keys at a concert... This is my story. I was mad like Jojo in Marvin's Room.
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