Politics & Lifestyle

Spirit Cleansing.

By Dziva 

Second chances have a way of finding you, like the warm rays of sunrise piercing through open windows and absent curtains. They have a way of easing you into accepting them, slowly yet abrupt to the soul, before you know it, the sun will be in full view with promise of all the to-do’s its rays come with.

The open road that day was filled with consuming scenic stories of the creator, and some just simple divine expressions/projections of the keeper’s hand. Sculptures of big birds, small men with absent torsos and abstract thought lay by the side of the road with no keeper. In my head I imagined the creator had placed them there. Placed in anticipation of my arrival, as if to say “You are welcome child, have no fear, the guardians are near.” My heart was at ease, lost in statuettes and eagle wings carved out of ebony. Lost somewhere between my impending fate and the view from mother’s car, of the open field.

Mother glanced at me and smiled, sardonic smile it was, bearer of feared affirmations that smile of hers. Unwanted affirmations.  Something about the wrinkles that formed at the ends of it seemed to drag my heart from within my determined grasp, until it was awkwardly lodged at the opening of my throat. Choking the very breath of acceptance out of me.

Second chances have a way…

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Open roads, they have a way of healing old wounds and drying up anticipated ones like a scorned desert sun. They have a way of presenting such delightful beauty and splendour in esoteric ways that seem to exorcise those lumps of fireballs clambering up a chest hallow with fear. These open roads back home, back to my people, my tribe and buried umbilical cords, these open roads back to the girl I once was ,felt like open arms and tight embraces of the Great Healer.

My spirit embraced back with an unrelenting acceptance that dotted on defeat and failure. My failures, mother’s humiliations, proverbial brassieres of thorns her beloved child had adorned her with.

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Her  beauty was like  a mellow  blue wave slowly creeping its way under your feet,  eroding layers of sand beneath you ,along with it  a piece of the restless abyss barring the gateway to your humanity. Slowly, surely, over and over and over again, but every time you look down the sand is still there, in between your toes, under them and some even well rested in their crevices. I would steal glances at her whenever we sat out by the fire. As my aunt would muse over life, patriarchy and the gaps in the System, my eyes would wander to her breast, map out the lines my fingers should abide by (given the chance) and photograph bits of her they wished to see.

Mother had hoped spending some time in the mother-land would serve as a spiritual/ social cleanse for her beloved daughter that had regrettably acquainted herself with the wrong kind of people. Anomalies, cultural deviants who had snared her pure daughter from the endearing unconditionally loving hands of white Jesus.

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Temptation has a way of dipping itself in impossible layers of chocolate and undressing your inhibitions with seemingly acceptable reason. That afternoon, temptation wore her flesh and knocked on my aunt’s door. It felt like a thousand needles were being jabbed into my flesh, seeing her close like that. Her face a breath away and my hands, a spiritualcleanse away.

“Hello” said she, eyes piercing into my core like a scalpel driven by an inquisitive hand.

“Uhm, so this is awkward. Thing is, my uncle, I’m not sure if you saw him, but he saw you and…”  She turned her head for what seemed to be too long a breather. My gaze was lost on her profile, carefully scrutinizing her folds and imagining myself at the centre of their need.  “Do you mind giving me, well him, your number?”

This was met by a long uncomfortable moment of silence from my end as my hands fumbled; searching through my phone for the numbers I barely knew and had half bother to make a mental note of. Inside me, alternate manifestations of myself watched in reticent horror at the sight of me mumbling half processed sentences and suffocating on imaginary chokers. I handed her the phone, my hands were in a complete state of eccentric tremor. Our hands did not touch.

I had passion filled sex with her in some dirty half-forgotten trenches tucked out of my mind’s spheres of consciousness. My spirit took in the scent of her imagined exhaled breaths like Holy Communion connecting a believer to the memory of a saviour she never saw. My knees were bent in prayer at the end of every one of these, begging for absolution to a god I wasn’t sure I should be acknowledging anymore. The god who saw the fornication I indulged in, whenever I was alone. Forgiveness I prayed, for tainting, violating a poor straight, Orisha-looking in a dress on her way to mass, big busted, curvaceous, honey dripping, and beautiful, oblivious soul.

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He spent hours at the tip of my breasts. As if that was all there ever was, as if that was all the tongue could ever caress. I did not mind. It gave me time, time to stare at the ceiling as most women do, time to revisit and re-create bits of stored memory long since wiped from hundreds of other ceilings before this one. For the past half hour she had shown up religiously over the face of this white washed ceiling, every 5 minutes. He doesn’t have to know that we are not alone, I told myself and smiled, feeling the power I had, feeding off of the nasty I was, mouth salivating at the thought of her clit drowning into the lips of my vagina. Clits rubbing, tongue flicking ___my legs flew wide open and I launched him right at my centre.  He rose to the excitement.

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He had a way of touching my hair like it was a bed of roses and his hand was on a mission  to discover how far and how deep you have to be in a rose,  to feel its kiss on your palms. When he touched me like that, when his fingers got lost at the root of my locks like he was left forgotten in a crop field, my body became enslaved. Indebted to the desires of my locks tangled between his fingers.

I wish not remember the kisses, the struggle for air as his tongue poked its way down my throat. The way my nose felt so sticky afterwards because somehow his tongue had invaded that territory too. I’d rather not.

I would clasp his face in my palms, as one would the promise to streets paved in gold. I would hold him close and lay him on my breast, as my eyes went in search of old memories of relations between the niece and I. Memories that never were, sketched on a blue ceiling this time.

My hands hurried down my jeans. Heavy with cold anticipation that seemed to translate as frost bites nibbling at my fingers. He lay on top of me and whispered something like “take your underwear off.” His plea to knead into my bloody flesh seemed to freeze his body with the kind of excitement that decelerated his dry knead onto my centre. I held on to the boxers he was still wearing with one hand, the other latched on his mouth and aggressively choreographed the rest of his movements to navigate me to that long awaited orgasm, the beauty on the ceiling was enticing me with.

……….

Her boyfriend kept stealing glances at her through the rear view mirror. His look was that of pure un-equivocated frustration. His gaze met my eyes and drew a precise pathway to my right hand, where a glass of brandy was tightly swaddled and moaning in desperation for a refill. His eyes glistened as if he had mapped his way to the enchanted grail that held within it all the answers humanity ever needed. He looked at his friend and signalled at my glass, which was immediately met by an animated beam denoting victory. “Rasta handei, let’s go get you another drink,” he said to me. I looked at The Niece as if she were some kind of Mother Prelate I sought to please. The density in her eyes seemed to plead with my soul to stay. Before I could even open my mouth to decline, his arms were tightly fastened around me and a second after that; my feet were securely on the ground outside the car. I must’ve found this hilarious, because for a minute I forgot her beautiful eyes and allowed this man with a holy beard to catch me if he could.

……..

I found my way back to her eyes, two hours later. Her boyfriend found a fight to jeer on, leaving her eyes, her garden-of-Eden-temptation of eyes. I watched her as she drank some more, fascinated by the moans that seemed to escape her lips after every gulp. She would stare at me with decided nonchalance, as if she knew how vulnerable her eyes made me. At the end of every shot she took, her face seemed to be a black hole swallowing up the distance between us. Her eyes on my skin felt sharp and smooth all at the same time, they felt like everything I had imagined penetration would feel like. “I am fucked” she husked, her humid breath melting into the skin on my ear drenching whatever inhibitions that had held me back thus far. My hands touched where her palms met the bottle and retrieved it. I drank from the same cup of adultery her lips and words concocted, my spirit held on to the moist left by her lips at the mouth of the bottle as if that wet warmth was the very elixir of life.

She moaned again, I looked at her and she moaned. My eyes followed the trail that her hand was drawing. She paused as her finger circled around the top button on her shirt. She paused and moaned. I watched her, hypnotized, caught and defeated. I heard her moan again as I threw my head back onto the seat in an attempt to redirect the blood that was flowing to my intimate bits, she moaned again.

……

Some times when I close my eyes I can still hear the sound of her tongue exploring the contours of my femininity, and her untrained hand… sometimes I remember how that felt too.

End