Chocolate Finesse

Chapter 3

The Rollercoaster

"Brown Sugar babe, I gets high off your love I dont know how to behave" - D'Angelo: Brown Sugar

The best of friends and lovers at the same time but also in next to no time. Which I need to mention isn't quite the standard default setting for black people in comparison to some white people seen out in night clubs under the influence with their tongues down each other's throats before they even know each other's names.

For me, apart from not knowing where your mouth has been lately, I also feel like kissing someone should be more sacred than anything else.

Not to knock those that get down like that, because the truth is that maybe the only thing I'd change about myself if I could only get past trying to justify it to my inner sensibility.

The ability to just let my self go. The whole white girl wasted free willie, loosey-goosey mentality. The ability to fearlessly elope with a stranger in Vegas a couple weeks after meeting for the first time. I think that's such a rockstar lifestyle, like really what a way to live although they suck at everything else in my opinion.

However, there I was, head over heels more or less with this stranger, in next to no time and why?

Simply because of her carelessly silly behaviour whenever we were together or on the phone. She'd make me laugh so much my stomach would hurt.

I would go home slouched in my car driving with the seat back low as usual but wondering if the pain was from excessive laughter or squeezing my abdominal muscles too much when she was on top of me leaning back like she was sitting on a surfboard on choppy waters.

Either way, it was sweet pain. I'm sure it's not what the great Fela Kuti meant when he coined the term 'suffering and smiling' so I'll just call it collateral damage.

I'd even have a consistent smile on my face over the phone for hours through our late-night conversations. My cheeks would ache the next day.

We were not as cute as the teenage love thing 'hang up, no you hang up, ok count down and hang up together' cliche, no. We just chatted away until one of us fell asleep on the phone.

One time she drifted off to dreamland around 3am, and I only realised when I'd stopped talking at the break in ambience music in between tracks. I could hear her cutely breathing deeply like a distant light breeze blowing in and out under a poorly insulated door.
Not quite a snore but of course I teased her about it the following day. Not knowing she had a screen recording of me when I fell asleep on another occasion while on one of our video calls, right up her sleeves.

Mouth open and drooling with the reflection of New Jack city in the mirror behind me projected on the wall.

On a good day she'd claim I looked so adorable and on an off day when referring to the instant she'd brush it off like that was her favourite part of the movie playing at the time in my mirror.

I've never really been the romantic type. Or dare I say I believe traditional romantic gestures like flowers and chocolates are corny in my books.

So I put a twist on it and got my favourite tattoo artist to draw up some beautiful flowers to run down from her ribs to her upper thighs.

She called while I was getting eagle wings tattooed on my chest. Tears building up in my eyes, in pain and gripping the bench with one hand and my phone in the other so tight that the damaged black oil looking screen was probably moments from occurring.

The sweet pleasure of her voice battled hard to smooth my pain so much it was a great distraction.

She mentioned having always wanted to get a tattoo but was scared of the pain and not knowing what to get.