May You Live Long Enough to Become the Standard of Beauty

Age Six
In the Nollywood movie Goodbye Tomorrow, a woman is dying in a hospital. Her sores are bubbling with maggots. Her wounds ooze something yellow and gooey. The woman says she’s sorry for trapping and ruining uncountable men with her body. This is the third movie we’ve watched this week that suggests women deserve death sentences for having sex with men who weren’t their husbands. I miss the misogyny; I’m focused on the woman’s sores. I begin looking for those sores on my mother after she and a neighbor get into an argument. The neighbor tells another neighbor that my mother is losing weight because she’s dying of AIDS. They don’t know that I’m around the corner.

Age Seven My mother is suddenly even thinner. Her cheeks have deflated. The area between her collarbone and her neck is hollow enough to store water. At night I get too scared to sleep alone now that she is dying, so I climb into her bed and watch her wrestle the sleep paralysis demons, her mouth slack as she struggles to make her limp body obey her wide-awake brain. I look for the symptoms of AIDS like the one the woman in the movie had, but my mother’s skin is smooth and clear with no maggots in her pores. It is just the weight loss for now. I wonder what sin God is punishing her for, since my Sunday school teacher keeps telling us how the Bible says that the wages of sin is death. I wonder if she knows that she’s dying.