I don’t know why it started or when, but I know that recently, it has been amplified. In case you don’t follow, this is all about physique. I am a slim, petite lady with a lot of bones to show. I have maintained a certain kilogram since I was old enough to recognize myself. Why won’t I be let be?
Yeah, I know the beauty being endowed confers, I have had enough of that comparison. I have questioned my womanhood on the basis of my size. I have placed my worth on how feminine I appeared and in all these scales I have fallen short.
Time and time again, when I try to trace the shape of my nationality in the bosom of women that comes from my tribe or continent. What will happen to me the misfit?
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a cry for pity or acceptance. I have been out long enough to know how to shelter myself from the storm by being an outsider, I have also learnt to be aloof from the plague of vanity engaged by all. I don’t envy you because you are accepted, acceptance is perception, it can be precarious.
Since my fall in the face of vanity, I have tried to look for other source of pleasure but why wouldn’t I be let be? You look at me you see bones, I look at me I see a woman who isn’t even aware that she is looking at her life from a vanity mirror where all she pitches herself against is the imaginary scale of womanhood, worthiness measured in fats and oil? Ha ha… You laugh, the cynical laugh of one who also knows about the struggle?
No you don’t. Wipe that smirk of your face. I’d love to blame you but, that is not befitting of my position. Remember, I am an outsider, I don’t have a place in the clan.
I tried one time to complain about my ostracization but what did I get? A lesson to remind me that the superior structures are a construct of societal super imposition. It is what it is.
Who am I to judge? It is easier for people to put you down when they see how well you can hide your scars, but when you hit below the belt like it is customary of their action, they plead weakness. Is it my fault that I have purged myself of the pain you can cause me and embraced myself as phenomenal?
Daily, you engage in the race for the crown that I no longer value because I am at the horizon where the unknown can take shape. Where form is functional and distinct. She said to me: “what does he see in you, with all the bones, he ought to have been afraid”… I wasn’t hurt that all she saw in me was the physical structure. I was sad that she equated my value to how he perceived me because of what she perceived him to be worth.
If it is all a game of perception why are we stuck in the inevitable reality of what we cannot change?
I am not my teeth, eyes, nose, lips, hair, color, breast and ass, skin and gait. I am not my brain or the sound of my voice on a phone. I am me, as intangible as that sounds. I can’t even function on this plane. What you know about me are the things you represents me with.
You don’t know me but you have been confronted by my representation and what have you done with it? You have shamed me for being non-conformist. You have dethroned the absence of a physical structure I have no control over and measured my value based on the pleasure you can fantasize about. I have been pitched against Barron of shapes that you qualify as enviable.
Well, let me let you know, I don’t give two f**ks. I survived the horizon. You don’t scare me. Take your image and shape against the weak minded. I find strength in my soul and your spotlight is too dim against my light.
I raise my head up high. Confident in my nothingness. How can I even compete when my scale doesn’t even exist. You laugh because I am different, I laugh because you are the same. Till we meet again where shapes don’t matter save your sermon for the congregation.
I will sojourn over the horizon, the deep and thick. Fly above color, shape and size. In all these things, ye, I’d be me. Indefinite, infinite…
Connoisseur of Memories 