My grandmother once told me that to love a man is a different kind of violence. It is the termite that will eat through your walls and doors, and to love a man is to shed skin — old skin, tough skin, new skin. Shed all layers till you are a ghost of what once was. To love a man is to wear foreign skin and call it yours.
To love a man is to get sucked into black holes, from trap doors into locked rooms. A stranger in your own home.
And every locked room, I discovered, held the screams of every woman in my bloodline. The further we got sucked in, the more pieces of ourselves we left behind to haunt the shallow halls of a bleak past.
“Maami, tell me. How did it happen?”
I sit across from my mother, or what seems to be the ghost of my mother. Or my ghost sits across from her ghost, I’m not sure.
“You ask pointless questions. What did they tell you? What did you see?”
“I- they said-” I pause and hold back my tears. “But what led to it?”
“Little one, you focus on irrelevant things. Is this why you’re here? You’ve lost your way.” She shakes her head disapprovingly. My mother’s hair is a halo of grey and silver now, divided into two straggly braids. She lost an eye and keeps her head bowed at all times while she picks at the hems of her garment frequently.
“I just need to know.”
“The love you seek cannot be found in obvious places and it surely cannot be found in me, child.” She laughs with her remaining eye drooping lazily.
After a short moment of silence, a sharp cackle echoes through the walls as she rises to her feet. She glides across the room like air, humming softly.
“How long did it take you to realize he wasn’t god?”
Long enough.
I wanted to say all the things that consumed me ever since I laid with him, like the void.
Would she have saved me if I told her that his every touch felt like thorns digging into my flesh?
Perhaps, but I searched for God in the wrong places. I searched for a face, and I searched in the arms of a man. I searched for an external voice that told me all the things I chose to doubt. I yearned for him for so long that I failed to see God in myself and in the simple things, like beauty. I let heated chains bound my feet in the name of love and felt the void grow. I watched its greedy hands stretch further till it occupied my corners and became the never-ending blanket that left me cold.
The void left the door open for its cousins, the many faceless voices that would become the invisible rope to my neck.
The voices were mumbles at first. Initially, a soft breeze whispering against my ear while I performed mundane tasks. Most times, a scrambled disk or nails clawing against glass that caused my head to ache and my eyes to reject the light.
Eventually, I revelled in the darkness, in the safety of the unknown. I relaxed and let each voice manifest itself as the darkness became our meeting space. I soon recognized the voices as the lost and suppressed voices of my female ancestors.
See, the darkness hid our faces and accommodated all our fears and desires. Most of all, it bore the pains of our years of endurance well. It carried our silence and even when we spoke, each voice rolled into the other like we were one person.
I hear a strange noise and I look up to find mother weeping in a corner. She is away from the light and her head is bowed. Her braids poke out like horns from her silhouette outlined against the wall.
“Maami-”
She looks up and her only eye lies in the palm of her hands, while tears stream down like a river from her eye sockets.
“I never wanted you to end up here.” She mouths from across the room as the ground begins to rumble.
Insanity was not the storm I expected, but the tiny crack on a glass that signalled my undoing.
I never called out for help the day they came to take me away.
Mother insists I should have called out for help.
The truth is the voices became clearer and lurked beyond the darkness. They became my shadow and I was constantly aware. They taunted while I cracked my skull against the wall and choked underwater to drown them out. They snickered while I lay and let him thrust or took his blow to my jaw. They manifested, even when I chose to run in my dreams. They were always present.
They — Past, Present…but never the Future.
The Future rejected us; and her rejection was the easiest pill to swallow with the sweetest aftertaste.
I was the calf prepared and fattened for the sacrifice. I wanted to mourn the loss of me but I discovered there was nothing left. Just like those before me, I had left pieces of myself in unceremonious places and suppressed memories, like the bed sheets of my lover, the lips of my torturer, the arms of a false redeemer and my blood on the bathroom floor.
This truth was the matchstick needed to set fire to the altar. So, I no longer accustomed the void to darkness. It became my light and peace, and every step I took towards it felt like my salvation. And the faint kiss of death became the sweetest lips I had ever known.
