THE SOUR TASTE YOU FEEL

 

    You were 18 when you first kissed a boy. You had just recently turned 18 years few minutes ago. You stood outside of a college party that lasted all night with your lover. He forgot it was your birthday but you had your hands encircled around his neck, his hands grabbed your waist and you were both locked in a passionate kiss, music blaring loudly behind you. Prior to this, you had fantasis about your first kiss and the butterflies that would accompany it. Rather, his lips had a metallic flavor to them, which you subsequently discovered tasted like blood. You were dissatisfied with all of the romance books you spent your adolescent years reading and fantasizing about in class. This overabundance of anticipation for your first kiss taught you that sex wasn’t such a big deal.

This was meant to be the ideal love story for you. It marked a turning point in your life when your attitude toward romance novels shifted dramatically. You did not read a book in the first two years you were with Stephen, especially if it was a romance novel. It occurred to you that love might not exist at all. Wonderful storytellers’ worlds were, in fact, imaginary constructions of what they consider to be the ideal world. You were afraid of leaving Stephen. He was your first love so you stayed. It was many years of continual fighting, emotional abuse, and a significant drop in your grades; but you didn’t leave because Stephen was the very existence of your breath.  Despite having troubles keeping your original goal of graduating with first-class honors intact; your dying father’s wish, a promise you made to him on his death bed. You stayed. You bared it all like a woman stuck in hell with her lawful partner.

You eventually got a grip on yourself and decided to call it quits. You think you are brave but we all know it was his embarrassing cheating scandal that was made public in a manner similar to the cheaters television program that woke you up. That morning you found out, you fell sick. It wasn’t a sickness that medicine could cure. If the earth didn’t open up and swallowed you at the time, it was mother earth’s blessing to you to pick up your humble self and run. A six-year relationship had ended. You didn’t get an academic degree neither could you bag a relationship degree. You found yourself asking a particular acquaintance, Bart, what people were saying about the whole controversy. It wasn’t people’s opinion you cared about it was the sour taste in your soul. A taste that has made you realize now you are indeed a lucky single.