On Becoming by Toke Makinwa

Author:Toke Makinwa [Makinwa, Toke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2016-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

At some point while we were dating, Maje had asked if he could tape us having sex. This was a new one for me but I would do anything to keep my man, or so I thought, and so I obliged. But I was nervous afterwards because I didn’t want the tape to get into the wrong hands.

I was home one afternoon and I needed to send an email, so I used Maje’s computer. As I was trying to delete my work from his personal space I found a video file in his trash folder. I was immediately excited; I’d always wondered what he’d done with that video of us. I opened the file with the intention of deleting it completely and forever. I dragged the file back to his desktop, and I could tell from the stilled image in the video that the person in it was not me. That person had a necklace on, and I hadn’t.

I clicked play and watched horrified as Maje had sex with Anita. I couldn’t stop watching. I was shaking all over but wouldn’t pull my eyes from the screen. Watching him pleasure someone else killed something inside of me. It was one thing for him to cheat on me, to give himself to someone else that completely, but to have kept evidence of it, preserved a tangible memory that he could go back to over and over…it made me feel like I wasn’t good enough or doing enough. Like I had failed somehow.

Watching that video, all the inadequacies I thought I had dealt with over the years came rushing back. I had been with Maje from when I was an immature teenager, through my twenties, and for most of those years Anita had been the standard I had to live up to. I had lightened my skin at some point – Anita was half Lebanese and half Ibibio, and Maje made me feel like he preferred her lighter skin.

All those years I had been working hard to create a version of me that Maje could love.

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