©Adeolu Emmanuel Adesanya
When I tell you how beautiful you are, you never believe me, you think I just tell you what you wanted to hear. Then you walk towards the mirror, to seek counsel, after all, mirror has no mouth, it cannot tell a lie.
I saw you catching a little bit of yourself in the mirror, the photogenic reflective side of your face. I saw you routinely checking, watching, washing and grooming the same areas for spots; like the pimples changing from a beauty spot to a pus oozing and an ugly one.
Afterward, you started slapping and baking on layers after layers of several paste of colourings, glitters, paints, and mud, like it will be a permanent features on your face, like it will never see a smug or a stain, like it will never be affected by your tears, your sweats and your slobbery.
You then spent hours monitoring the exodus of your hair, as they migrate to unwanted and clearly unwelcome areas, like the overgrown eyelashes, the out-sticking and overconfident nostrils hair, the lazy and spineless quiff and curls always falling out of place, the too obvious to ignore always growing moustache, and it's like your brows have got a mind of their own, and now turning into a ridiculous unibrow.
I watch you cut, tend, splice, twig, bond, and muddle coddle the hair into place. You then start undoing it, roughing, scattering, twirling, and spinning the hair like it is a foreigner on your head. Thereafter, you plaint, tidy, comb, barb, and straightening them like a lost and found love of bitter lovers. You religiously do this to maintain the fraught of a relationship, a short lived sense of fleeting fashion, of nonchalantness, of hope and hopelessness, of love and of hate, of abandonment and of duty, of care and of carelessness.
You channelled lots of effort and energy on this small part of you, hoping the excesses on your face balance the deficits from the rest of the your body. I guess you reckon those part of you are too large to be cater for, too ugly to beautify, and too dense to be perfect and mastered.
Hence, to ensure no one see this part of you, you left it hidden deep under several layers of fabrics, and of needles and threads, and hidden tears and lies. Let all eyes be mesmerised and distracted by your ever radiant face, and be enthralled by the colour combinations of your attires.
Then at night, you repeats your routine, by undoing and reckoning. You spent hours ripping, mopping, stripping and cleaning off your alter ego, the only version of you the world now sees. You then catch yourself on the mirror for the very last time, and your heart breaks a little, seeing how beautiful you look naked.
Finally, you tiptoed your way to bed, wiping away the tears and telling your nostrils not to join in the show of shame. You make sure that the light is swiftly switched off, so that no one will see, and so that you will not see, how beautiful you truly are.
