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You, the slippery Pisces fish who barely escaped my quick Cancerian pinchers – you are the sole reason I’ll never bake another man a red velvet cake again.

After two years, a shot to the heart, and a slap in the face, there is nothing more than a deep, slow aching to show for what once was.

I’ll call it a pearl.

Every time I see your face or hear your name or think of the way each layer of that cake was perfectly baked…I get irritated. The way you swallowed a thick, pillowy white frosted piece – practically whole! – then fixed your mouth to so eloquently say, “I don’t know why I told you that. I lied. I don’t love you, there’s no way we could be in love,” vexes me into the most terrifying stupor. It’s irritating.

But as I sit writing this letter to you, I know I have the prettiest, most precious jewel any moon woman can make – a pearl.

I wear this opalescent gem where my heart used to be. To suitors post-breakup, it’s been a shining example of what not to do.

For me? Well, it’s either an albatross or a string of pearls, depending on the day and the way it hangs. Sometimes it threads a few hairs on my neck before I tuck it away. Sometimes it pushes air out my lungs and up my throat like a rolled tube of toothpaste. I’m either suffocated or alluringly sexy, depending on the wind.

When a woman feels sexy, she’ll throw on a pair of heels and strut the concrete walkway as if it were her own red carpet leading to a podium on an awards night dedicated solely to her. When a woman feels sexy, she’ll do all the things her man asks and especially those things he doesn’t. She’ll make the batter from scratch, double checking her grandmother’s recipe to see how much buttermilk or cocoa powder to add.

She’ll even fall asleep afterwards on the sofa, worn down by the wax-on-wax-off motions of scrubbing mixing bowls bare of bright red dye. She’ll wake up forty minutes before her 9 o’clock class, and she won’t be mad.

But when a woman is suffocated – literally squeezed like a toothpaste tube by bare hands twice the size of her own – to the point she can’t scream for help, she’ll find herself at a crossroads.

And on this path straight ahead, there are no more red velvet cakes for anymore men.

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Courtney Akinosho
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