To listen to an audio of this memoir click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YvEW3z4xU&t=34s
We laughed about it once in the woods. How every year tens of
female mosquitoes drink my blood to grow their eggs. Every sweltering summer I
unwillingly create the next generation of mosquitoes. My skin bears the scars,
like a tribal Ethiopian woman at her scarification ceremony, the excruciating
process of having her skin raised with thorns, delicate swirls and dotted
patterns, she wears them proudly, a sign of beauty, maturity, belonging, and her
ability to endure childbirth.
“Why don’t they ever bite you?” I asked him playfully and a
little indignant. “You just taste better” he says in his vacuous way, not
looking at me. When the vicious bugs have just had their fill, all I see are
harmless little pink bumps, shyly rising on the fleshy parts of my arms and
thighs, as my blood begins to battle the intrusion. A few hours later I’m
dragging my bruised body to the nearest chemist, blinded with the aggravation, desperate
for a gel or a cream stronger than what I’ve already drench my skin with. The
itch that began with a quiet murmur is now an endless red-hot scream, my skin implacable,
I scratch as if peeling it off, I want to dig out the sinister creature that
has clawed its way into me, eating away at my flesh.
I wish for sleep, while my limbs ache and throb, in my delirium,
I mutter pathetically to myself. My sleeplessness is half injury and half
qualm, “girls must be punished for fooling around with boys in the woods”, the
sound of my female shame, and the penance hammered into me since childhood. I
imagined how he sleeps, untouched, his skin smooth and cool and white, while a ravenous
fire sears mine.
he asks me “do you want to meet?” I know what I don’t want; I don’t want to be bitten by mosquitoes, but I go into the woods with him, and I don’t spray my skin with repellent, so it smells of perfume - and just in case - tastes of coco butter. Broody female mosquitoes smell me from half a mile away, the cicadas’ mating call, a thousand rattles shaking in unison.
