by Elizabeth Edward

 

We are not your regular kind of girls, we are not feminists, yet you won’t see us conforming to the odds.

We are your butterfly kind of girls.

We are the colour after the rain, we are to you like the lyrics that make a song completely perfect, like the soundtrack of you listening to Davido’s “If”… and you await to scream; my money, my body na your own.

You see us in everything you do, our smell lingers on your bed sheets after a long time of our departure.  Yes, we smell of the tropics but we reek of certain things like freedom, Pierced vaginas, Dreams,  Salt and Water.

These are the reason why we don’t stay, the reason why you can’t hold on to us for so long.

They are words familiar to us, familiar in the sense that the world identifies us with them, they begin to theme us as the “fuck girls”.  But they are just mere words.

God

Fuck

Love

Hate

……….. One word!

We understand that a thin line stands between them using them constantly on a partner until we find ourselves with another repeating a pattern. No, we do not confuse love for sex, we understand that us wanting a man is different from wanting to build a home, and we have learnt to be indifferent about our desires and wants.

We do not love for a long period of time, our uncertainty is not sure to us, finding a reason not to stay, One minute we are burning for you the next we are burning, but burning for freedom and when we leave we do not want you thinking you are insufficient, that you do not fill us, cause baby,  you do and that’s the thing that scares us.  To find that we are so complete with you is not something we are comfortable with. We want a life where we can live with or without.

On certain nights when we are without, we find ourselves burning for you, yes we do. We think about you on waking, we see you as a prayer, as a mantel,  as a home.

But then we do not choke you, becoming the thing around your neck. We find another way of choking you in an uncertain manner when we grant you freedom until you begin to long for a form of choking.

We are not like the girls that bother you about the phone calls, we do not scroll through your phone and we are not bothered about the girls that come, cause we know our place in your lives.  Yes, we do.

We are not your regular kind of woman.

To own us, you have to be stable, to be certain of yourself and your strength,  we need you to be like a nest that can save us from ourselves, we need you to be certain,  so certain that we feel you are our best option.

We are the high aiming girls, the girls that always want to achieve and with you being certain of yourself we find no reason to dim our light.

Cause be rest assured that we won’t dim our light for anyone, not even you!.

As with all winged things familiar to us, if you find us coming back to our nest

Which we have built out of you

Be willing to let us go,  for if we lay our expectancy at your feet,

You wouldn’t breathe

You wouldn’t live.

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Elizabeth Edward is a writer and poet, a passionate lover of the arts