I used to be a soft and spontaneous soul. Lust and music were my drives. Whiskey on a dry and empty stomach, lips the color of a newborn's blood, and a man's husky arm around my waist and his eyes looking through mine but not seeing my mind just what his mind will go through once he gets me laid on that 200 thread count cotton bedspread.
I now look back and see that life to me was comparable to a white plastic bag. I didn't care for it. I didn't even bother to pick it up and put it in the trash.
My careless ways made me to be a careful woman with three letters that run through my blood veins and tattooed on my forehead by a man that I laid on my 200 thread count cotton bedspread who had those same three letters written on his forehead with invisible ink written by his ex-lover, I dare not to see.
Mama’s voice always echoes in my mind every time I place myself on that hospital bed of room 234A. I always hear her say the same thing, too. “Anathema, you best be getting what you have to do done.” She told everyone that when they entered her house. What I had to get done was something no woman, no; no human being should ever go through. Being told if you don’t do this, you’re gonna end up dead. I wish I was told this before the word positive came before *** on my medical records. Now, I’m sure to end up dead. They say “oh, it’s not a death sentence. Many people live long lives with ***.” Yeah, that’s fine but its bull.
I had a dream once. It was a happy dream; a dream that I could be living right now. I could be wrapped up in the arms of my perpetual man. His perpetual love. His perpetual laugh. I could be wrapped up in the arms of my man in a big white house with navy blue picket fencing and a big backyard where my kids run and play with real smiles on their faces. Smiles that illustrate innocence and wonder and imagination and happiness and life and dreams. I had a dream once but I flushed it down the lavatory along with throw up after a night of heavy drinking.
My blood is now rotten and inked with death and shame. It is no more sweet and powerful like a gospel sung off a church woman’s lips. It’s tainted not by only a disease but by my offhand lifestyle. I want to blame myself for what I am defined by now but I’m too prideful to do so. I’m on a bumpy and dark road. I have no sight of what my future is to come and past. My past, I now see, is here. Standing in front of me, screaming at me and telling me I am nothing. But I know I’m not nothing. I’m something and I, Anathema Jacobs, just don’t know it yet.