The Women in My Life Are Unfinished Portraits

Abstract

The Women in My Life Are Unfinished Portraits Kanyinsola Olorunnisola (bio) 1 I fuck like it is the end of the world. The men in my life say I have a mouth that makes them long for home, a mouth that commands a man to stay without saying a word. And that is why they keep coming back, looking to find something they left behind the last time I allowed them inside my body. Each time they come searching, I imagine what is lost is not a thing. The sugar daddy who so loved his wife before meeting me at a party at Eko Hotel, the playboy who had sworn off commitment before my body told him there was only one way home and it looked like me, the pastor who preached against fornication before he realised there was more truth between my legs than in the holy books—they all keep looking for the lost remnants of their past selves; the selves they had once known before coming undone so beautifully in my hands. And it becomes a cycle—they come back into my body to recover lost parts only to end up leaving more behind. And I am thankful for their love, believe me. I am a chronic lover too. I love recklessly, without restraint. I love like my mother loved my father—smothering him with so much affection that he threw himself off a bridge. She loved him into his grave; that is how my sister Taiwo puts it. She loved him till his body could not take any more, till he decided the water under the Third Mainland Bridge was his only escape. Mother's love will do that to you. It is one of a strange intensity—at once cold and flaming, loud and gentle, distant and in-your-face. [End Page 174] I remember her every time I look at the photograph hanging on the wall of my bedroom. In this photograph I am three and seated on her lap, pulling at her hair while she tries to break free. The picture is old, granted, faded away by time and decay but there is something particularly unclear about the image, something vague—an imprecise emotion. I still cannot tell if the look on her face is a frown or a smile. Her body language is one of relaxation and agitation. When I try to paint the picture the colors get out of hand, spread themselves across my canvas and become unrecognizable. I tend to read too much into things. But this picture is not one of them. It is a conduit for a truth I have always known. Everything about Mother is ambiguity. And there is nothing more ambiguous than our relationship. It was a simmering thing, our relationship; building up heat upon heat until it detonated. Now, the two people in that photograph are long gone. They have faded from reality, existing nowhere outside the picture frame. I do not quite remember when the problems began. But there were early instances, like when I was caught kissing Banji Fawaz, the senior prefect boy, during prep. "Kissing" was not all we did, but that was how the school principal kindly put it when she told my parents. Or when I fled campus in my third year to live with a Chinese expat for three months, before she found out from one of her friends who frequented the Moroccan restaurant Jianyin loved to take me to. Or when I flirted with Dad's friend at his sixtieth birthday party. I was Mother's little disgrace, her very own problem child. When I got my first tattoo, at twenty-one, she called Aunt Rosemary to talk sense into me. It was a lower-back tattoo of Inanna-Ishtar. She said I was inviting the devil into her house, that Beelzebub had got ahold of my soul. But how could I explain to her that nobody owned my soul except me, that I was the only one in control of my own life, finally? That when next a man came for me, I would always have extra eyes at my back—a goddess's eyes at that...