Story - Chosen profession
"You are wasting your life!" she screams. Spittle accompanying her words, failing to lubricate them. You feel your temperature raise to your ears, hands trembling. This is the fourth conversation you've had with her about your chosen profession since she found out. But here she is again, making sure you remember her views of you. You let her continue, restricted by African traditions. Yet again. She paces the room maintaining a disgusted face, as if you're made of maggots morphed from a decaying body.
"How do you think sleeping with men is a career ehn? Don't you have any dignity? have you no shame?"
She flings her arms up in the air, both looking like exclamations marks, punctuating this moment. You imagine that they embraced you instead, but the foreignness of this action ridicules this thought.
"Mom, please. I am not in the mood for this again." You sigh out, while trying hard not to show her the impact of her words.
This she claps her hands to and fakes a mocking laughter that you imagine too was real. How lovely it would've been. Just like Bolani's mom's, those times you visited her house. That was 10 years ago. Bolani no longer talks to you. Well, she stopped once she visited where you lived. Which you kept from her for as long as you could. But you remember the day she left your house; she didn't maintain a superior look like some friends who lived down the street. No, she had a look of pity mixed with a final goodbye, one now etched in your brain. Her face comes to mind often, especially on Sundays when you scream her husband's name as he thrusts into you. A regular client of yours and a very elite one. You trust Bolani to only have the finest of what life offers.
This too you want to explain to your mom, that fine things come with a price. Instead, you watch her as she paces the parlor of the new house you bought. Its' coolness reducing the temperature of the situation, a heat that would have suffocated at your old home. You wish to tell her of shame and how it clung to you desperately. its' intricacies intermingling with the memory of her on her knees begging the landlord not to throw your family out. He smirks, enjoying this display of powerlessness. "you know what to do then", he touches her bare shoulder, leaving his hand there longer than you thought necessary. and your mom lowering her eyes and avoiding its' contact with yours.
You understood shame then and explored its' crevices when you saw your brother crying himself to sleep unable to see a future beyond the four walls. So yes, you know what shame is and this you use to send your brother to medical school. You use it fully and wholly, and you take in the men this way too. With each contracting muscle, you see the road of your future lengthen. As you inhale the sweats of their bodies, new membrane coats your lungs, taking in new air. their pleasure makes you imagine too that life can be beautiful, that your mother's laughter is near, that her embrace wasn't erased by the lack that permeated your home.
