*Readers Note – This Piece Contains Graphic Language*
I know this feeling all too well — I hate it when it comes around.
It, most certainly, has become a good friend of mine. You had your pleasure with this body. Tell me these lips didn’t send vibrations through your soul? These hips, did they not serve you well? I know they did. I left you with the pulses of my walls to haunt your dreams. I saw your face when you came. I saw the joy. I saw the relief. It was me that released the pain.
Mama didn’t know — how could she?
She grew up in the last time when men knew what it meant to be honorable and fair to women. In the last decades when they formulated questions that resulted in consent for a date. Even showed up on the doorstep with flowers or some token of early appreciation for the evening they were both about to share. A moment where both chivalry and decorum weren’t interrupted by pressures of pleasure.
But those days, are long gone — and what’s anyone to do?
Andre 3000 from Outkast once jokingly rhymed on the song “Behold a Lady” about the day children would have visit museums to see what a lady looks like. That’s funny. Actually, it is quite an amusing joke. But where will the monuments of credible men be erected?
True companionship — a rarity, that when sought and found should be revered.
While mama may have raised her many daughters with threads of titanium. Rooted in honesty and loyalty. What does any of it matter, if when we give in to temptation… we are left wide open and easily discarded?
How could mama know how to prepare her daughters for battle? How could she know the war we were born into? Which pieces of wisdom to arm us with against this breed of careless suitors? How could she know that the men who would cross our paths would be so — inadequate?
It didn’t used to be this painful to know you. Today, you are anything but the shadow of a gentle man.
When the streets say “Hoes be winning”. I know what they mean now. These aren’t things mama could have ever prepared me for. Mama didn’t know, but I do, finding love is war.
Olive Benson