[ON HOLD] LOVE ME LIKE ART

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— IMANI "BAMBI"
L. CRAWFORD 🫦

TO THEM, I'm Bambi.

To a brigade of mannerless, non-committal men that want to hitch a ride on my wicked, wicked carousel. The epithet comes from a presumption, albeit the wrong one, that my soft-butter brown orbs paint me as a canvas of doe innocence.

Of quiet subtlety.

That out of the strum of my cherry-kissed lips that I am this wallflower of grace, a rose of perfect purity. A woman who doesn't roar, but instead speaks sparingly and quietly.

Parallels are drawn between me and the Disney tale that was a fixture of our childhoods, thinking that we are one and the same. The same Bambi that was dainty, polished and purred with a certain level of eloquence.

The only similarity we carry is the epithet itself.

I am a woman, that isn't what I'm contesting but graceful, pure, well-intended... those aren't descriptors I'd willingly choose to describe myself and will never be. I am my own kind of woman, with my own glossary in how I craft my own steps in this big, bad world. I have a wicked charm and a penchant for starting mess. The fabric of my childhood didn't let me grow into a woman, fuelled by soft girl living. Trauma—the ugly, unsettling beast, spilled into my things and left me adrift. I had to make sense of it in ways I still don't understand as the hurt violently chirred, whilst I had to find my way around her wrath.

So, me... purportedly soft? Hell no.

Me, innocent? Ha. God is probably laughing at that in His throne room, knowing every seed I've sown, every groundnut I've bust open.

Me, supposedly a flower? No, I'd rather be a thorn, knowing I'm not for everyone. If I had a gun pressed against my temple and I had to describe myself, in one word, then I would be a rosebush, trimmed in thorns.

You touch my thorns?

Don't be surprised if you bleed, nigga.

It sounds brute and uncouth... clearly.

If my mum could hear me and my vitriol, she would curse me out with her ranting eye roll and catechise me that I don't need to talk like I am my plight. As a black woman, I don't need to add more notches against my name, especially when one notch is one too many.

The backstory to them calling me Bambi is because of my eyes, coloured in glacial brown. Except, the pretext is a little more corrupted in contrast to the Disney tale that we love so much. They jut out wide and burn into a darker, corrosive brown once the juncture in between my thighs swell with sticky hot heat and I was told that I look... captured.

Since then, since I was 18, that epithet stuck.

I lick my lips slowly in fond remembrance against the velvet. Desire now floods on every inch of my skin, bruising the colour of my cheeks into a more tonal, plum-brown. And with it, my eyes are trapped between two worlds.

Two worlds that are gravely distant.

Two worlds that struggle to intersect.

There is one world where I'm Imani Lux Crawford. 27. Of Bajan and Jamaican descent, where I'm impatient and I have heart-splitting dreams that I wish I could pour into but I'm ruled by fear, by plausible rejection. It is also where I've seen important things to me, shatter into a million fragments.

And the other is a world of sex, devoid of any emotional investment because those are not the terms. It is where nothing is asked of me because I do the bending. It's where my breath hitches, those same doe wheel in a desperate stupor and my lips, tremble. Not out of fear.