Reading is awesome!

I've taken to 'reading' quite often during the past couple of weeks. Not 'reading' in the sense that you'd think of the verb but 'reading' as in the action of picking up a book and planning your entire future based on the contents of the pages. 'Reading' as in deliberately putting everything else on the back burner in order to accommodate your new found obsession.

I quite like the idea of reading. I suppose I've fallen more in love with that than anything else in the past few weeks. I don't know why, it's just that the thought of picking up a book and immersing myself in someone else's world absolutely excites me. It excites me more than warm toast and the butter has just melted and is gracefully gliding down the rough surface if the toast and into every crevice...

I find that I often get scared when starting a new book. I'm scared of opening the book and taking in that glorious, musty smell of recycled paper and immersing myself into a new world. I'm scared of taking in the beauty of every letter typed into the page; of every grammatical or spelling error that I may encounter; of every stain or pen mark left by a careless reader which I may encounter. 

I'm scared of falling in love with the characters. And I'm especially scared of letting them go.

It goes like this: I make all sorts of new friends in these books. These weird and wonderful characters who don't care about my height, weight, personality or general appearance because they'll never meet me anyway. And I'll never meet them, which makes me very sad. 

I mean, what do you do when you have completely immersed yourself into someone else's world and then you're violently pulled out of it? I find that once I near the end of a great novel, I procrastinate more and come up with more reasons as to why I shouldn't read it. Well, right now at least.

I never want to let go of these characters. I don't want Richard and Sally to get married just yet. I want them to carry on this incessant game of 'cat-and-mouse' that annoys the hell out of me. I don't want Martha to tell her parents that she's a lesbian just yet because I keep replaying in my head how badly that scenario would turn out. Or it could turn out quite beautifully and they would hug and kiss her and tell her that they still love her and that everything will be okay. Even though things in these sorts of stories are never okay. Well, not really. 

It turns out that Uncle Ben raped Sally when she was younger so she thinks that Richard will do the same to her and she stabs him ten times on their wedding night at The Hilton. She then stumbles out on the street and Martha's car strikes her down and instantly kills her. Martha was on her way to her parents' house from the hospital after finding out that her lover have her AIDS because she's secretly a back-room whore at the Chateau Mormont. Martha leaves the scene and reaches her parents' house and tells them everything and they comfort her and tell her that they are all going to live happily ever after.

Only they don't because Martha dies from AIDS as karma because she didn't turn herself in. Sally is buried in some dingy graveyard next to her husband but they get their names wrong and no one ever comes to visit them. And Martha's lover is still working at that back-room whore house, only this time she's into into men.

Notes from A Dark Skinned Girl

When I was younger, I was always comfortable in my own skin. As a child, I was happy and carefree; not concerned with matters of beauty and the like. I never looked at my mum and wondered why she was of a lighter skin tone than me. I never looked at her hair and wondered why it was a different color from mine. No. I was above such trivial things.

I preferred to content myself with crazy experiments I conducted in my grandparents's garage. I would empty old teabags into an old honey jar and add in all numbers of eclectic ingredients; lemon tree leaves; freshly-squeezed lemon juice; mud and leftovers. I remember the triumphant look I wore on my face when I stole a glossy brown egg from the pantry and added it to my mixture; then the ashen look I wore as I bowed my head under the heat of a heavy scolding. 

                          ***  

When I moved to Botswana to be with my mum, I had to start a new school. I had no friends and had just entered my adolescence. Everything was foreign to me. I had never seen a guy, save for my best friend's brother, and wasn't prepared for the onslaught of emotions that struck me when I first saw him. The frantic increase in heartbeats; the sweat dripping out of my pours and the obvious stutter in my words as I spoke to him; the widening of my eyes and the dilation of my pupils as I gazed upon him. All that crap. (/_\)

                          ***

And yet I felt inferior. It grew worse when I came to high school and it is still there; hanging over my head like a dark cloud of depression. I noticed it everywhere. Every guy wanted either a white girl or a yellow bone. All the guys I liked at least. That's how I grew to hate my skin tone even more. I know that people always say that black is beautiful and everything and that I should be thankful for my skin tone. I haven't woken up once in my teenage years and said, "Holy sh** I'm beautiful!" 

I haven't. Yet.

I'm still a teenager. There may still be time. Perhaps one day I will wake up and realize my full beauty and feel comfortable in my own skin for once in my life. But for now, I will remain in the dark, contemplating how much better people would treat me if I were lighter skinned.

                        ***

Sadly that is a very prevalent factor in my region of Africa; the whole of Africa in fact. Lighter skinned people are seen as superior and more attractive. That's why women aspire to appear more white in order to attract mates. They cake their skin with poisons that claim to lighten their skin but end up causing irreparable damage to themselves. I would never do that to myself: no matter how much I hate my skin tone.

Maybe. Someday.