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A Different Kind of Afrosheen

Shake it up so it sprays out smoothly…

You reached into your glove compartment to retrieve a yellow aerosol can with a red top

We’d just filled our chests with a tasty haze and your car absorbed the scented evidence

The perfect night for a hot box and live show

 

I miss you now and think to then when you sat to my left behind the wheel

So comfortably I asked you what was in the can, “Is that afrosheen?”

You laughed

“No,”

And smiled widely as you sprayed all four corners of the floorboard to mask the scent

I told you we should start a band and call it “A Different Kind of Afrosheen”

How much of me thought that suggestion was so distant from my reach

You pet-named me “Love” and made me want you to stay

Or, better, to ask if I could go with you when you told me you were leaving town

What made me think I couldn’t ask?

Fear.

Insecurity.

Both things I am aware we both struggled with at some level

I wanted to share you with that Special No One

 

Long Beach borders, permeable as they were, lended themselves to your coming and going

Then my own going so abruptly after my body released the fruit of our closeness to each other.

My internal denial of what left my body and how you never knew what made me so upset with tears in the coffeehouse on the corner not too far from where we first met

 

The memory of red fibers and crystalline fur over buds kelly in hue

The aroma of your room when we were through

My mind mad at the notion of time apart

Spinning and agitated so much more than any vessel should ever endure

Precisely like the contents of that can before you sprayed

Absolutely nowhere to go but in a three hundred sixty degree explosion that I bottled and packaged so neatly for nine years

To release now

All for catharsis’ sake

Forget the factory packaging on the can;

Those type of appearances require maintenance that I now refuse to curate

It was my idea, that afrosheen band

And as you rest with our child

I watch sunsets

and write

and serve

I live now unbound.

Beyond the walls which held  those contents under pressure

Inert until shaken.

POP. Lock It. DROP It.

My sensitive conscience keeps probing me… regardless of fault or transgression.

Today’s topic is how to strengthen myself in terms of presence in the moment.

How to live in the now with clarity, attentiveness, and appreciation.

I can’t keep placing myself in situations from which I must be rescued.

Damsel In Distress never suited me well…my impatient ass can wait on no one.

Sometimes not even my Self.

I had chamomile tea at nine am this morning just to loosen up and stop planning so much.  It helped me calm down a bit, but the lesson in Patience still nags me.

I think to October November December

2011, how you caught me in mid-cancellation.

Fresh Longhorn graduate.

Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics.

I was tutoring one-on-one as a “side hustle”

I lost my flashdrive and told you so on my way to inform my student that our appointment was off.

“you’re IRRESPONSIBLE!” you proclaimed.  

Unabashed and convicted

Fists seemingly clenched at your sides.

“What?” as if I didn’t hear your crystal clear enunciation.

You repeated yourself.

“You. are. irresponsible.”

You know me.  Nostalgia has served time as my consistent friend for as long as I can remember.

She nudged me in the direction of this memory.

Pop, lock it. Drop it.

Pop, lock it. Drop it.

Were I to take your emotions and

pop and lock them for my safe keeping,

would I then drop your heart and lose its pieces like that flashdrive I never recovered in fall 2011?

Am I being drastic or hard on my Self?

MySelf?

Myself. Yes.

But when I separate Me from Self, I think not…

Being that the world doesn’t revolve around me, my Self, and Eye,

I can now integrate myself with my Self and become reconciled to the fact that, yes,

the pop lock drop accident to your heart may have happened if we’d hung out like I wanted us to.

As Nostalgia and I sit arm in arm here in the Library of my Alma Mater, she pats my tender knee

and I am comforted.

I am glad you said No.

Rather that you were too tired, under the weather, and couldn’t go.

Knowing how antsy I become when things don’t fall in line with My plan, I can say it’s alright now.

Yes, it’s fine.

I am here and survived it all (and much more) specifically to live better than before.

And I hope you’re well and

I choose to believe I didn’t ruin it all with my own costly carelessness.

Human as you, I now make allowance for mistakes that require the grace every person needs daily.

For that gift, I am ever grateful.

My TimeWarp Life

Living in this TimeWarp I see

I just noticed the essence of where I am physically

I strive to quickly calculate the formula for reversal of this vacuous vortex of space and time

But the deeper I am pulled into this voracious cornucopia without air, my arms and hands with pen and paper stretch miles ahead of me

and I can hardly recall my equations of escape that I long to test for functionality

I tested out of first semester college calculus fifteen years ago with an A

I reflect on an eighteen year old me ecstatic about starting school in Austin, knowing virtually nothing of the changes that lie ahead

Changes that now at thirty-three shape me into a woman strong enough to bare my soul on wordpress

I plan; then I calculate.

If measurements are off in my spiral notebook daily schedule, I plan the values out again.

Another list

Another sum

Averaged out to prioritize the first to-do of the day

The first purchase from a paycheck of the new job

I dunno why I bother with pen and paper at all

…down the TimeWarp blackhole they go.

I know what I am doing

I have it all in my head

I will never let anyone convince me I’ve lost my mind again or that I’m not where I should be

If I lose touch with reality, it is because I loosened my grip.

go head, Mr. Wendal

thanks for that important lesson in choices. i met Mr. Wendal, and he sat me down to tell me the parable of the Klan and the coon.

don’t send “angry black females” to the psychiatric hospital if you don’t want them to point out the coon at the Klan rally.  the coon at the Klan rally wore a full hood and bed sheet.  but no one noticed his ass because he was the last one on the FAR left.  the Klan is rooted in the spirit of his ignorance.

praise the Lord for the parable of the Klan’s coon.

when i was on instagram spraggamuffin posted a photo that struck a crucial chord in me that had not been tuned in a very long time.

Saartjie (Baartman) signed that contract on purpose, and we still ain’t caught on yet.

Wake UP!

I know I am not Iggy Azalea, but somehow I appreciate her for who she signed with.

The cycle is the problem.

The system is HIGHLY functional.

her name was not Hottentot Venus, y’all.

…for a reason

what faux-marriage proposals and short term engagements have cost me since 2008:

$77,400. waiting on the perfect man is a dupe. waiting on the right man is assuming far too much cuz ain’t nobody “right”. choosing to wait until i am married is a hoax because my dress is seafoam green (i can’t wear whiiiiiite…) with a red moscato wine stain down the front of the bodice, and he ain’t show up yet. nigga prolly lost his engagement ring again. mentioned something about making some babies, but likes the idea of BEING a baby more. he always makes random tittie comments like:

“the motivation for why he got dressed that morning”

TITTIES

“the fuel for that 230 am fap fest at the bachelor pad”

TITTIES

“how he became self-aware and blazed unchartered territories in his relationship with God and the Son, His Savior Jesus Christ”

TITTIES

congratulations! you like titties. you have now won a pair to have for your very own. would you like the pair behind door A cup in the pink tank top? or…drumroll please… the pair that A cup aspires to be in the very near future (with or without your help): your mother’s? and YOU get to chooooose… it’s your birthday every day and it’s always a tough decision to make. but God gave you balls for a reason. and you have informed me on more than one occasion that you were telling me sooo many things for a reason. and i listened to you intently, on purpose. now that i press mute, nothing happens.

and i am even more certain now that we might not get to skype this weekend.

HASHTAGsorrynotsorry

i will test things better next time.

don’t avoid it, Udelle.

but don’t jump in and face-flop in it either.

exercise more caution.

perhaps i was right…i know i was right when i hesitated,

but going against my first mind, i let go. 

then shuddered to think he collected my deepest darkest secrets and forgot where he put them.

i bought him a six pack, picked up my cat, and left…

wondered why a week and a half later, he didn’t follow.

i visited and called for directions approximately ten minutes away and he forgot that i was coming that day.

saturday, i got there around seven, he got the job and we celebrated with a stash he was surprised with.

i was too excited to have a good time. 

by the time noon rolled around sunday and we’d read up on Agape, he looked so tired of me…

almost like he didn’t want me there.

paranoid.

didn’t want to leave the house that day.

almost didn’t want to get out the car at the store.

“can i please get something to eat at target?

sunflower seeds and coffee only sustain me so far. i’m a grown ass woman.”

he must have forgotten that we planned this a couple weeks ago.

or was that just me?

bamboozled…

fake smiled in the only picture we ever took together.

stiff ass mother fucker… i know your ass is high!!

why you can’t relax?

you’re bumming me out.

i gotta get up outta here, Dawg.

next time i won’t be so flattered by the prospect of seeing you so as to disrupt my regular sleep pattern.