i want my stuff back/my rhythms and my voice/... who is this you left me wit/some simple bitch widda bad attitude/i want my things...
-- Ntozake Shange

At first glance, it appears you came out of that hurtful relationship unscathed, unblemished, and in fairly good shape. You seem to have made it over and through, and you’ve got 2 or 3 good lessons to share with the masses once you fully get on your feet.

But, something is missing. Some things you lost in the situations and circumstances of your experience with him. You lost some CDs (Marvin Gaye, gone; Incognito, gone; Fertile Ground, GONE!); he claimed those. A few books aren’t in your bookcase anymore (he was an avid reader, that’s why you stayed so long). He kept a few of your towels, pillow cases, and dishes, and he tore a page from your phone book (why that *%$!) But those are little things and you can go to the nearest department store and replace them (except the Fertile Ground CD!). But that’s not what’s missing.

Somewhere along the way, you lost you – who you started out being and who you were becoming. How you lost that and you were with your Self all along simply escapes you and blows your mind. Now you’ve got to do some searching to figure out where you’ve gone and who you are now.

With you went your self-respect, the trait that made it possible for you to always keep your head up and look yourself in the eye. Now you can’t find it and you presume you lost it after you hit rock bottom when you tried any-and-everything to please him and be with him and he left you writhing on the dirty floor drowning in tears and sweat. You had it, your self-respect. It must have dissolved in all those tears.

You’re missing your ability to trust again – both another man and yourself. You can’t trust a man to be and do what he says and you can’t trust yourself to discern the differences. You’ve instead picked up cynicism and doubt – traits you hadn’t had before, traits that were foreign to who you were. But since you can’t find that person anymore, it seems fitting that you’d also lose the trust and confidence you’d once possessed. You’re sure you had them. Now they’re gone.

Your money and the shirt off your back are gone, too. You’re guessing they left when you were trying to impress and keep him, when you bought him things to show him your love, then bought and spent more and more just to prove your love – and outdo the other Sista who was busy buying trying to prove her love to your man. You had money; now, it’s gone.

And you’re missing the ability to see yourself as loving and sensual. You’ve been yelling and nagging for so long, to even get anything sweet and sentimental to surface is a monumental effort in itself. You’ve lost the desire to even try it again, let alone even care that you can’t show any love. You had love, knew love. It’s gone now, and frankly, you don’t feel like looking for it.

But, really, all you want back is your peace, peace you had before the other losses. You figure if you just had your peace back, you could get the other stuff back, at least reinvent it. You want peace from thinking about the losses; peace from picking yourself up and trying to piece yourself back together when you have only limited recollection of who that was; and you want peace from the feelings of an injured heart.

No, on second thought, you want all your stuff back now. After all, it was yours and you didn’t mean to give it away. You didn’t even know you’d given it away until now.

Guess you didn’t get through it as cleanly as you thought after all.

Anyway, go get your stuff back!

And don’t forget to get that Fertile Ground CD!

Sadiqqa © 2007