I didn’t see her. She wasn’t loud like the other girls, she wasn’t even one of those skinny, tripping on her heals and flicking her hair sort.
Infact she tied her hair up in a no nonsense bun, as if she were trying to keep people at bay. I didn’t see her, but I heard her.
It was one of the lectures I was dozing off in, I’d had my share of Shakespeare and I wasn’t interested in interpreting poems.
So with my eyes half shut I heard ‘Patriarchy isn’t a way of life, so no the woman in this poem wasn’t waiting for her husband to come back, like you believe but she was waiting for inspiration’, from that day on I couldn’t unsee her.
Suddenly I went from hanging out with the B-Boying gang to chilling in a park just listening to her babble about her opinions on everything.
What’s worse is I didn’t even know if my girlfriend knew who the President was, let alone her opinion on his policies, but I knew everything about this girl.
So I spend my days giving her salsa lessons, her first smoke, reading her a comic book that seemed alien to her .
My girlfriend’s brown eyes were nothing compared to her bottomless black ones, her curly streaked hair seemed boring in front of her straight flowy strands, my girlfriend started became a blurring memory until she wasn’t.
Today I see my wife enter the door with her curly streaked mane and I can’t help but think about Her.
Her hair was plaited shut so tight on the day she found out about my girlfriend, just like her, it had closed itself to me.
I wish I had taken her out of the shadows, because if I had, my life wouldn’t be as dark as it is today.