Dear readers, it’s been more than a while I blogged. Whew. Forgive me please, really. I got caught up in, well…life et al. Here’s a little something I wrote a while ago and decided to share on here. I hope you enjoy it and please don’t forget to let me know what you think. I’d love your feedback. Thank you.
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I’m looking at a woman I don’t seem to recognise. She stares right back at me, looking so familiar and yet so strange.
She is almost out of shape; her hips are overlapping and seem to be falling out of her body. Her ample bosom spills out from beneath the gown she’s wearing. Her make-up is otherworldly and even the layers of foundation cannot hide the lapse in her facial skin. There was a time this woman was regarded as beautiful. A time when the men had scrambled upon each other just to get a piece of her.
A time when she’d not needed nearly half of the make-up she has on now, to look pretty. A time when she would have drawn a second and even third look from a man; now all she draws are whistles from drunken men ogling her large behind.
I am staring at the woman and cannot hide the look of disgust on my face. When did she become this person? When had she lost her appeal?
I know the answer yet I am afraid to say it. To accept the truth; that the woman is me.
I turn away from the mirror and sit with a heavy plop on the bed. Nicodemus has just told me that he has found another wife. The man had the nerve to tell me that his useless Pastor has prescribed a new wife for him!
And what about me? I asked.
He said we are living in sin; that it is against God’s will.
I began to laugh. After six children kwa? You must be mad.
Nicodemus looked at me like I was the mad one. I don’t blame him. He is still handsome with his fair dimpled face and I am the one looking like his mother after having six children for him.
Who is that your pastor? I asked. Who is the man that wants to tear a family apart? Is that the work God sent him to do?
Emily, family? But I did not pay dowry on your head nah.
Idiot. So it’s now you know? When you were disturbing my bed at night and eating the forbidden fruit, you did not know e kwaa?
I am born again now ooh. Emily, don’t make me commit sin.
Born again? Better born again and go and see my father.
When he saw the argument was going nowhere, he’d left; muttering something about women.
I am waiting for him now. After nine years of living with him, playing faithful wife, opening my leg him to deliver his children all in the name of ‘I will marry you’, he has now decided to change his mind? God forbid!
I will not go back to my father’s house with six children and no husband.
Shebi when I was young and beautiful he couldn’t keep his hands off me? It was always, Emily, let me touch your breast now or Emily, give me a kiss now.
I let him touch more than my breast, I let him drink from the fountain sef, and now he wants to abandon me because I am no longer slim shady. Okay now. We will see.
If only I had listened to my mother.
Emily, don’t let that boy give you belle ooh. She said over and over again but I was too beautiful to listen. Now, he touched me and got me pregnant and my story finished. My father dumped me in his house and since then it has been baby after baby after baby.
Nicodemus! You want to make a fool of me? Oya, bring that chinch into my house and you will see all hell will break loose.
Mimi A.
The Hourglass 