The first time this question crossed my mind was in the summer of 1997. I was sitting on my famous desk in a Laundromat owned by a family member in Norfolk, Virginia, when Tuwanda (not her real name), the-one-who-would-have-been-my-girlfriend, walked in. She had this heavy face of somebody burdened by the duty of lifting the world out of an endless pit. I asked her if she was alright to which she said yes. Yet, her face betrayed something on the contrary. Then I asked if she was hungry. First, she paused, then she said yes.

Instead of ordering pizza as I normally do, I reached out to a microwave beside me and brought out Chinese food that was delivered minutes ago and offered it to her. She took it very reluctantly. I watched as she placed it on the counter, a few inches from me and slowly opened it. She picked out the raw onions and threw them into the trash can. She did the same with the green peas. Afterwards, she lifted the spare ribs and advanced towards her mouth. Few inches to her mouth, she suddenly stopped.

“You want to kill me,” she murmured.

“What?” I queried.

“You want to poison me. I can see it in your eyes,” she continued.

I had known Tuwanda to be erratic, outlandish and capricious, but I never knew her to be paranoid. I never knew her to be psychotic.

“Why would I want to kill you?” I asked in utter amazement.

“I know that you know.”

“Know what?”

“What happened yesterday?”

She looked at me as if to decipher whether I was playing a fool or that I was genuinely ignorant. She could not decide at the end.

“You don’t want to know the truth.” She said, virtually to herself.

I looked at her and my eyes said it all: Confusion; pity; and resignation. Instantly, she knew what would come next- that I would not want to hear whatever she had to say.

“OK.” She continued, “I can’t tell you because you can’t handle it.”

Still, I said no word. I let my face do the talking. And this time the displeasure could be felt a mile away.

“OK, OK, last night I slept with your friend, Herbert.”

The statement was supposed to send dozens of Shaka Zulu’s arrows across my heart. And it did. But I did not express it. I looked at her face, guilt was dripping down her eyes. She did not know what reaction to expect from me. This was in America where an eleven year old boy dumped by his girlfriend opened fire on his classmates in protest. You can only guess what a twenty-something year old would do.

Like a bolt from the blue, an answer came to me. Without thinking of how ridiculous it might sound, I dished it out to a woman at the verge of becoming my girlfriend who instead chose to sleep with my buddy.

“Was it good?,” I asked, smiling.

Tuwanda would have been an unlikely girlfriend, a union of two opposites. In many ways, she would have been my Pretty Woman. Unlike Billionaire Lewis in the movie, I did not pick her up on Hollywood Blvd in a friend’s car. She just walked into the Laundromat one morning and said, “I heard that you are a writer. I want you to write about me.”

I looked at her, petite and pretty like Toni Braxton. “How old are you?” I asked.

“I’m 19,” she answered.

“Then you should go and live life, let things happen to you and maybe in 20 years time, you will have a story to tell.”

She ignored my admonition. When she began to tell her story, I was spellbound. At 19, she already had three kids all of whom she had given up for adoption. Her father had been in prison since she was twelve. She could barely read and write. And most shocking, she could not add. She had difficulty knowing how much change she was given.

I was in my Pretty Woman mood. From what I found out in weeks that followed, this young woman had potentials that the world had not given any chance to emerge. And I felt I was the one charged with saving her and bringing out the best in her. In a short while, I was writing lyrics for her and recruited a friend of mine who was a musician to work on the songs. She had great voice amongst other potentials. She started singing our songs. We were talking about helping her get her GED and even doing a photo profile for modeling jobs.

Though Tuwanda remained confused about my reaction to her escapade with Herbert, I went to my bed and wept. The days that followed, she began to avoid me. At the end, she moved on without goodbye. The last time I heard of her, she was washing hair at her mother’s cubicle at Park Avenue salon. The question that kept flashing in my mind in days that followed was ‘what do women want?’

… to be continued