You fight me every time you see me. You fight me with mumblings and sneers and you challenge me to an eye-rolling contest. And I take you up on your challenge. I don’t back down. I never back down from fights. Even as a child, a sickly bonny child, I didn’t take brawls lying down. I threw punches with my meatless fists. I didn’t win any of the fights, of course. Each and every fight ended with me eating dust and nursing broken limbs. Even though I always ended up at the bottom, at least the fights weren’t pointless. If for no other reason, at least the fights quenched our anger. And that’s my problem with our fight. It is endless. We just keep picking up where we left off and this has gone on for months. Moreover, it’s pointless. It is pointless because only one of us is angry. And even then, it is misguided anger. We both know it is. But I guess you need someone to blame for your husband’s wandering ways. I don’t know why you picked me. Not that I’m surprised; I have come to realise and even accept that luck wants nothing to do with me. Your husband is not at fault, of course. He is the one who made a vow to you and then went out of his way to break it but sure, he is the victim in all of this. I mean, the poor man had to lie and scheme and play us like fiddles. I can’t imagine how tasking it is to have to go around breaking hearts. So let’s blame me. Let’s blame me because I must have been the one who forced your husband to remove his ring and hide it in his pocket. Surely, I must have forced him to lie to me that he had no family to speak of, and that in fact, he was hoping he and I could start one together. Or maybe he didn’t lie to me. Maybe I knew that he was ‘taken’ but I was so desperate to be in a relationship that any man would do, right? I must have been scared watching all my productive years go by that I started to grab any man in my path. And I played ignorant when you suddenly showed up, armed with a gang of married and well-built women, talking about, “Leave my husband alone, get your own.” And it’s not enough that I explained, with evidence, that until you showed up, I didn’t know that he was a husband. I didn’t know he was a two-timing *bad word*. It’s not enough that I cut him out of my life since then. According to you, we are in a competition and your husband is a prize to be won. You don’t know me. You don’t know that I am a firm believer in the saying: if you are going to eat a frog, at least eat a fat, juice one. Your husband is a frog, alright. But he is not juicy. And so for the sake of all that’s good and sane, please, woman, tell me exactly why we’re fighting.
