A Love Bought

She loved me best when my pockets spoke fluent thunder. I mistook that thunder for God. Every note I spent came back wearing lipstick, calling me my love. In the kasi, we know this kind of miracle: a full fridge can make a cold heart feel like summer. So I fed the fire. Bought roses. Bought weekends. Bought little futures with money that should have been teaching my children how not to inherit my hunger. She never asked for my soul. That should have warned me. She only asked what the soul could afford. Then poverty came knocking, that old relative nobody invites but everybody knows by name. Suddenly her eyes could no longer find me in the room. And I understood too late: Some women don't fall in love with a man. They fall in love with the weather around him. When the rain stops, they call the drought a change of heart.