Most Complex Villain

Prologue

"When I tell you do something, I mean that shit."
-Erik Stevens, a.k.a. Killmonger

Life started out as simple. You never really saw the world for what it was and all you had to do was cry, eat, excrete and sleep. As a matter of fact, life started out on mother Africa and she gave birth to multiple nations. Life was easygoing and everything including everyone was getting along just fine.

However, there's always someone or something that comes along and messes everything up. The world had to scramble to fix itself and life had to start over again and Mother Nature had piece herself back together. Maintaining the equilibrium is like clockwork for it ultimately gets repetitive like sand dunes. When that perfect homeostasis is thrown off of balance, chaos ensues and Things Fall Apart*. Humans eventually had to find out the hard way that it's more intricate to pick up where you left off.

        We got farther and farther and farther away from what is righteous and the truth whenever we dishevel Earth's equilibrium. Everyone is busy focusing on getting themselves and their loved ones together but sometimes it's never enough.

        Meanwhile, we continue to get stranded in the darkness and whenever someone has a slither of luminescence, society seeks to destroy them and all the goodness that they stand for.

We humans have a knack for doing this. It has been a recurrent theme in history and it will continue to be so for generations to come but, that doesn't mean that we should stop striving for what is right. We should wake up and keep educating and keep learning and keep inspiring so that we as a people can rise from the ashes. Black History doesn't start with slavery nor does it end with it. We are more than our thighs and our lips, we are strong and powerful. We spark change and influence nations : just look at our diaspora.

We have come from a long way; however, we have a longer way to go. It's not the time to sit back and watch on the sidelines as we see injustices in our communities, it is the time for us to take action. To revolutionize and challenge the status quo of American society. We have to learn how to love ourselves first and foremost and secondly, we have to get educated, get awoken. Self-love is an important essential step and in order to do that, we must confront our painful pasts and face them.

My akoma mu tɔfe* had his heart and mind in the right place but his actions were fueled by hate. Erik Killmonger is a perspicacious young Black man who wanted nothing more than to see his people to succeed. But alas, actions speak louder than words and even though he was extremely woke, he had been surrounded by violence his whole life and that was his main way of dealing with problems. We actually had first met in a local pub in Dublin, Ireland while I was on a 4-week vacation; consequently, it was there when I saw Erik almost brutally kill a man who wouldn't leave me alone. It absolutely scared me shitless but I could not deny the raw attraction I had to him.

After several successful dates, cute couple photos and three thorough love-making successions, Erik Stevens dropped off the face of the Earth for 7 months. I had never felt so degraded, so disappointed......so mortified that after all those years of telling my friends to make smart choices and being a know-it-all, that the almost exact same thing happened to me. After being hurt for so long, I was mad as hell. Like this nigga couldn't even leave me a note or a voicemail saying that he didn't want anything else to do with me but you left me something else to remember you by? I give this man my all and the only thing that he left me was some money, his favorite cologne and some of this clothes.

After my vacation, I went back to the States and stayed in New York for a while before moving back to Texas. A lot of my family and friends were shocked but they were really supportive and I needed all of the help that I could get at the time. I eventually learned to forgive Erik and then I had to forgive myself for letting an educated man sweet talk himself into my heart and mind.

On somedays, the good and the bad days, I reflected on our relationship, which could be described as deplorable but somehow intensely warm at times, was very tumultuous but Erik was always a very zealous and attentive lover. He was wild, dominating, always unpredictable and he knew exactly what to do to make me orgasm. To put things bluntly, he blurred the lines between pain and pleasure. Our three times making-love lasted for long periods of time and Erik only needed an hour or so to rearrange my guts and fuck up my credit.

I was so far in the dark when it came to knowing that man, I didn't know either if I was coming or going. I tried, desperately tried to put distance between him and I but he just kept popping up out of nowhere and then eventually he started to leave his stuff in my apartment so that he wouldn't go home. He used to always talk to me in his father's language but he never told me what the language was or what it meant. He had sweet and tender moments and that kind of made me self-conscious.

Sometimes when we would fall asleep together, I used to wake up to him crying out for his father. It used to make a few tears fall from my eyes when I had to wake him up because when his eyes finally snapped open, they just looked so empty. It was as if the world had swallowed and sucked all of the life from Erik's beautiful brown eyes. I never found out what happened to his father until one rainy Saturday morning, he decided to tell me while I was making us french toast with orange marmalade and berry compote. He didn't go into details but I got the gist of what he said and that day was spent crying, eating, laughing and watching movies.

There were other times where I would get so scared when I waked him because it would be as if Erik was in war in Afghanistan or Iraq and he would put me in a chokehold or wrap his hands around my throat while sitting on my chest. When these PTSD episodes did happen, I had to better educate myself and learned how to handle them whenever they reappeared. Erik started to respect me more and by the time I got used to his outbursts, he would make it up to me with passionate and tender sex that usually lasted for a day and a half. And that man wonder how I got pregnant?

But, then there were those days when I would rest my head on his scarred chest and I would press my ear against his ribcage to listen to his steadfast heartbeat hoping, waiting, and praying, that someday, he would give up his desire for revenge and stay with me. I would fix my mouth getting ready to tell him something and then he would interrupt me to finish my sentence, did you know how annoying cute that was? That man was my rock and my sun and rain all wrapped up into one and when he left, Erik Stevens wrenched my heart from my chest.

I loved that man for he was the me dɔ wiase*. Our children will know how to stand up for themselves and they will see that the sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire. However, I did not want them to know the total truth about their father and his family history. I desperately wanted to protect them from the violence that was in our everyday world without them growing up in a bubble. But that all changed when there was a usurper who took over Wakanda and kidnapped us.

Life started out as simple, so when in the hell did mine become so complicated?

Vocabulary:
• akoma mu tɔfe (Twi language) -literal translation is "heart inside candy; sweetheart"

•Me dɔ wiase (Twi language) -the love of my life

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It's a really phenomenal book by the way so I suggest that y'all go read it 😉.
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—> Things Fall Apart is about the tragic fall of the protagonist, Okonkwo, and the Igbo culture. Okonkwo is a respected and influential leader within the Igbo community of Umuofia in eastern Nigeria. Via : https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/things-fall-apart/book-summary