The Professionally Beautiful Woman
An explanation of The Struggle.
Hadassah wanted the wife life. She had just turned twenty seven and was tired of unsuitable liaisons, wage slavery, and lonely nights. All she wanted was to become a decorative wife. However, there were no suitors in sight. She was worried. Was it too late? Was she too old? She perused social media photos of the successfully ensnared, women who wore sumptuous gowns to lavish wedding ceremonies, then subsequently changed their surnames and transitioned to lives of seeming ease on their husband’s dime.
She had reversed the stance of her university days. Previously, she had held that getting married would end her independence and send her hurtling along the path of no return towards domestication and its ensuing banality. At the time she had been into Ahmadu, her classmate. He was a head-turner: muscular build, burnished golden brown skin and a glorious full Afro. He was not particularly academically inclined, and Hadassah was dissatisfied with Ahmadu’s poor academic performance. She wanted to do a Masters, he wanted to drop out. This disparity in academic ambition and achievement was what had ended things with Ahmadu: while she aspired to excellence, he appeared to have made peace with mediocrity.
Time was starting to etch itself on her face. She was sure that her allure was slowly dissipating. Her deft mastery of the dark arts of maquillage did not always succeed in erasing the fissures that were slowly cropping up around her eyes. Black don’t crack, it was said, but she was seriously contemplating her friend Svetlana’s advice: fillers. Svetlana had been injecting her face for the past four years, and she assured Hadassah that it worked. She recalled the vanishing act of Svetlana's mole, a cosmetic triumph of miraculous proportions. For months it was there, a centime-sized glossy pink protuberance on the pale porcelain expanse of her left cheek. Then it vanished as if by magic. Hadassah had said nothing of it. She wondered which surgical enhancements would improve her marital chances. She had succumbed to the lure of skin-lightening unguents promising endless effulgence which she purchased furtively from dubious online vendors.
She was 5’5” with curves in all of the right places. She had yards of glistening, luminescent brown skin, cheekbones of death, springy, lustrous black coils streaming down her back. There was a twinkle in her eye and dimples in her cheeks. In her mind she was no great beauty, but she believed that earth-shaking, soul-stirring love was nevertheless within her reach.