on being experienced

I’ve known about living different men in similar ways. Always with the same number of pleasures and tears, burns and mysteries… the illusion always brand new… Love dresses life, colors survival, disperses all the gathered-up grime. Love is a heart accelerated, a beating on the heart. With him, I rolled into the deep gutters inside myself, sipped some very bitter vinegar, sucked on some fierce peppers. With him, I knew pain of the dead belly, the desire for little ones which grows like mushrooms on the ruins of ovaries. I’ve tasted the abandonments, I made some people suffer, they made me suffer everything. I learned to write letters, to make myself sweet for a fellow who wasn’t worth it, to make myself sweet anyway without knowing why…..

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 312, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov