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Oh husband

The man with the sweet tongue has gone rogue, and in the place of strokes of love is strokes of the cane.
Oh husband, what happened to the man that used to call me his butterfly and his sparrow? Because right now my aging neck makes me look like a vulture and my food you say is only fit enough for the flies. Why do you treat me like an intruder in own my marriage? Haven’t I the right to be loved like everybody else out there? Haven’t I the right to call myself the wife of so and so?
Oh husband, tell me, how long will I stomach the torture you feed me with everyday? I have prayed long enough but God seems tired of hearing me crying over you every day. I shall not take a stick, because my mother taught me better. I shall not answer back because my grandmother taught me patience.
You are taking advantage of the fact that age has caught up with me, and I can no longer go back to my parents because they are long dead. You wooed me out of my childhood home and I was forced to become a woman, to abandon girlish laughter and dressing, to stop spending much time at the rivers spreading red ochre all over my face. I was forced to become a mother at the tender age of sixteen, and like a good wife I obliged. Is this how I get paid for abandoning my dreams and ambitions to feed your now over-inflated ego? The thin man I found and nurtured till he got a potbelly now bullies me and spits when he sees me around. Why did you walk into my homestead that day? Why did you see only me amongst all the girls in the village? Why did you pick me yet I was not the most beautiful of all in my group? Why didn’t you reveal yourself to me back then? Maybe I would have taken off and hid in the bushes till you left. Maybe I would have been married off in a place where they would love me till I died. But how sly you are, the hyena that laughs in the mountains and lets his prey run away from echoes straight into his mouth.
Oh husband, I really want to curse the day we met and wish you never got to see my father, and my mother never got to like you. Why are you condemning me to life in the ashes consoling myself with dirges and painful memories of the past? I would really love to turn back the wheels of time and revel in the sweet memories of ‘once upon a time’ but can I find them in this darkness?
Oh husband, I would not want to wish you bad, but why should I wish you good when I know you will never find it? Keep searching, but you should know treasure is what you knew and left to seek more that you will never understand, for the woman that loved you is no more. She has gone with the wind. She has walked into the sunset and shall not rise in the morning. She has lost the war in the past and the present, maybe the future is what was tailored for her. Her heart is still and cold and blood is turning to ice, for what is the use in holding on to a capsizing canoe? Why hold on to the hearts when they have turned black as stones on the riverbed? I will walk away, I will leave your house cold and miserable, and when I walk away, don’t come looking because you lost your chance, and I just found one last to be free. Oh husband, I loved you, but what kind of fool would stick to a tattered coat in the cold rainy season?

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