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Man vs. Self (A perspective on Love)

“A man can make his mouth say anything.”  That was a heads up I got from my Auntie one sunny afternoon.  She had gotten that word from her Momma who is now long gone.  I looked up at her with one eye half closed and my hand at my forehead trying to shield out the blinding rays of the sun.  It was relevant for me right now today,  for her in her day and for the generation that preceded her.  That is a trip.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  There ain’t nothing new under the sun.  Looking back now I am stung by the irony of that afternoon.  When she spoke that word to me it traveled from my ears and directly into my spirit and there I clung to it cause I knew I was going to be able to use it on a rainy day.  Let me see the hands of my sistas out there that have fallen victim to lip service.  Go on....hold your hands up high!!!  I know I am not the only one.  The sun shining down on me that day was God comforting me and helping me to learn my lesson in distinguishing the difference between fact and fiction.  Sometimes the truth is so blinding that we try to shield our eyes from it.  Can I get a witness???

                I had the chance this weekend to get another pearl dropped on me.  This time it was a chilly, rainy night and a friend and I were riding to the beach.  We were listening to the Quiet Storm and Patti Labelle was on singing “If Only You Knew”,  and I was telling him about a man I loved once.  Someone I slipped and gave my heart to.  Someone I listened to and paid attention to and believed in when he told me he loved me.   My friend listened intently as I gave him my version of the same old story.   I told him about how I cooked for him and rubbed his feet for him, made love to him.  Sistas, we know how to give good love, don’t we?  I also told the truth to him about the love that wasn’t returned.  The needs that were ignored; promises unkept.  I felt silly as I detailed a one sided relationship that was doomed from the start and filled with deception.  As I listened to my own words my mind went back to the day my Auntie and I shared our conversation.   A man can make his mouth say anything.  The words he had spoken to me left his lips like a boomerang never to return to me.  My friend listened as we rode, silent.  He absorbed every word I said and then gave me a new perspective.  He said, “If a man is not pursuing you, he is pursuing someone new.”  It made perfect sense to me.  A chill colder than the night air went up my spine.  Sometimes we are so preoccupied looking for Mr. Right that we can’t see who we are dealing with.  We so busy listening to the lip service that we don’t actually hear what is being said. 

                As we cruised through traffic, my mind drifted off to the other morning when had I turned on the TV just as some preacher was speaking about how women needed to stop feeling like the answer to their problems is a man.  Tell me something I don’t know.  Half sleep and breath stinking, I was lucky to have cut the tube on at that time because I needed that word also.  Reality can sometimes stink like morning breath too, but let’s stop doing that, okay y’all?  The love we have to give is worth so much more.  We have to watch who we give it to.  I pulled all of these pearls of wisdom together, each obtained from different resources and made a blanket of wisdom to wrap myself in. 

                I’m riding down the road again with my friend.  There is silence and contemplation.  He breaks the silence finally by hitting repeat, and turning up the volume so I can hear Patti again loud and clear.  “Sing those words to yourself,” he remarked.  Long after the song had gone off, I was still singing them in my head.  How funny it seemed to sing a love song to myself.  But really, in order to see love, we have to be love.  Remember the words to the chorus?  Let them ring in your ears to remind you of who should be the first person you love.  Yourself.  Once we do that, it is then we can truly love someone else and attract the kind of love that boomerangs back and knocks you off your feet.  Feel me?

                                                                          by Bridgette Hogan
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Bridgette is a contributing writer of Blacksonville.com