At some point you gotta stop choosing people who aren't choosing you. Put all that energy that you've been putting into them, back into yourself. You have way too much going for you.
More you might like
I write or whatever…
I remember the day my mother took me to the streets of a busy wenze-marketplace and picked out the most beautiful maputa for me. The fabric was dyed a soft blue at the base and had royal blue waves depicting rising waves edifying its surface. Yellow suns danced around the fabric and I saw her gaze upon it with confidence. She haggled the price and triumphantly, gave the woman five Zaire’s . “Swa!” She pushed it towards me and I held the fabric gingerly in my hands. It was beautiful. The colors reminded me of the sun gazing upon the unyielding Congolese river. The water still rising and swelling even under pressure. But this fabric wasn’t to symbolize my power, it was to remind me of my submission. “Maí iza èlastique mpe epesi míngi. Kolinga kozala de maí. Mwasi ayebi mpe, comme maí tu dois toujours donner.” Water is bending and it gives many things. You should want to be like water. A woman knows that like water you must always give. I remember my mother had said these words to me as she placed the fabric upon me preparing me for my first night serving The Facless Men.
I was to bend over and offer warmth and comfort to bodies that could not love mine. I was to laugh loudly, shrill and jerk at degrading remarks about our bodies and shortcomings like the women in my village. Like them, I was to show my decaying teeth like a broken mare hoping they find me docile and sweet.
The ritual begun once the sun nestled himself between the arms of the horizon. The Faceless Men would gather in our home and sit around a small ember flame. They’d yell for someone to cover the windows to keep the moon and her light from coming in. Maybe they feared seeing themselves in the darkness. Maybe they’d know they were monsters. But monsters rarely want to be human and men tend to be worst than monsters.
When I held their plates that night my hands began to quiver and shake. Maybe out of anger most likely out of fear. Yet, when I brought the food I was to serve over to the first of many Faceless Men I couldn’t help but glance a peek from the corner of my eyes. I was foolish really. I had hope to find something familiar, something I could possibly connect with outside of the women’s fear and terror. I was wrong. I was met with something much worse than the stories of old depicted. I was met with emptiness.
My mother would clipped at me to lower my head more and avert my gaze. “Men do not like a challenge.” She would know. Her chest was scared from the places my father had burnt her. He had a face and a name but regardless, he was a man.“It is love. “ she’d chirp. “It’s how they show it.” That smile fixed upon her face is what I knew her most for. That smile that silenced the world but could not silence her soul from screaming. That smile that hid her heart but displayed her eyes. She had mastered wearing a mask long before me.
