"I couldn’t recognize the woman staring right back at me…I had become a monster to my own reflection in the mirror. “May your beauty not be the end of you,” my mother’s words echoed in my head, and I hated that her words were coming true. Beauty, they say, is a weapon for women. Mine, I no longer see as one, but an illusion.

During my prime, I was the epitome of beauty, and I didn’t hide my pride about it. I would take a million seconds to run a minute errand. I was lazy and proud. Men would worship and serve at my feet as I wished. Mama snapped about my laziness, saying no one would take a lazy woman as a wife. I would look at myself in the mirror, admire my physique, and shout, “Men shall worship me! God didn’t create such a goddess to do dirty works.”

Men never ceased to run after me, both young and old. Some would take up their fortune just to see a smile on my face. But these men were never enough for me. They all always lacked something: the young were too broke, the middle-aged were married, and the old were too old. Still, I didn’t deny them the admiration and desire for my body, for the riches that came with their camouflage. I knew love wasn’t always what they desired from me.

In my quest to be queen, not a bride to a second-hand man or servant in a man’s house, I had lost all the essentials for such a beautiful dream. Damilola was different; he promised me heaven on earth. His words weren’t clichés like the others. But he wasn’t to be mine alone, and again I was to be the other woman.

Ready or not, Damilola would never slip out of my fingers. He was ready to turn a blind eye to my flaws, my shameless past, and treated me like every other righteous woman out there. Such love I didn’t believe I could find again. For I thought of how miserable I would be in old age if I couldn’t find myself a better man to make a home and children.

But his wife wasn’t part of my little happiness. She shouted more than I thought her voice could carry. I was subjected to misery. The little secrets I carried became daylight; I was everywhere in town. Fingers were pointed at me alone, like I was the only one caught in the crime.

I was to be preserved, but I was swayed away by lustfulness. “Shameless woman,” “Home wrecker,” “The other woman” would have been something of proudness, but I wasn’t fortunate enough. Confined to my home, I couldn’t walk on the streets without whispers and chuckles.

Starvation was soon to become my reality. Hunger wasn’t the way I would sign up for; food has always been a friend, never an enemy. I decided to wear my shame in the best way ever and walked to the market.

Mama Ade whispered, “Look at her, shameless woman. I would let the grounds open up and swallow me if I were her.” The women around her hummed and chuckled. I summoned courage, asking, “Do you women have no work rather than gossip? Has Yinka’s story become an income source for your feed?”

I wanted to ask, “Was I the only one in the act? Why am I the only one suffering?” Mama Ade retorted, “See who is speaking, a woman of jinx. I pity the women whose homes you have destroyed with this horrible face you call beauty. A husband of mine would never stare while others do.”

I replied, “Is this man you call a husband the same one caught stealing a goat? The same man who drinks away his life?” Mama Ade lost words, and her companions chuckled slightly. She spat at me and walked away.

I walked home, disgusted by how I had subjected myself to a low entity and how these people had gnawed over it for so long. Glaring at myself in the mirror one last time, I asked: “If a woman like me could still be deserving of a man, if a woman like me could still be gazed upon, if a woman like me could still be happy again... If I were to be this woman, I have to better light up a candle than continue to curse the darkness.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I wished I had been wiser and saw beauty as more than just a weapon but a virtue.