Recently, my friends are I were talking about crushes from the past and how we have matured in our current, advanced 20-something mindsets. *cough* Bull shit! *cough*  One of my best friends, lets call him Soran, came out of the closet to me when we were 19.  Before he stepped out of the closet (and unfortunately NOT into the role of my sassy gay bestie who I could take shopping and tell me that I was such a spring, not an autumn; you LIE Sex and the City!), I was very much in love and expecting to marry Soran.  Obviously, that plan fell apart on me, but from 13 until I was about 18, Soran was my unrequited love.  I just KNEW that he would eventually look up, see me with my dreads falling gently over my shoulders and my full lips in a perpetual smile (I was in unrequited love, okay?!  I was allowed my sappiness…) and he would know, as I knew, that we were meant to be.  Since my gaydar is practically nonexistent, I saw only one obstacle in our path to happily married bliss: Soran liked the hood rats.

Now let me be clear, I am not equating big bootyness to hood rat probability.  (I am totally doing that.)  I know that this is one of my first posts on my blog, or at least one of the first that I’ll write specifically for Black without Back, but I don’t want to establish an anti-booty bias here; the booty doesn’t make the lady.  Soran just happened to date girls who were a bit lacking in the class, manners, and decorum department but blessed in the posterior one.  I thought that this was a phase that he was going through.  I, musique23, cannot be by your side during that phase.

I am not a hood rat.  I can’t fake the funk; I fuck up the lingo, I am unfamiliar with the typical experiences that go with it, I vacationed in Spain in middle school.  As my cousin says “I’m not about that life.”  You are 90% more likely to find me curled up on the couch on Saturday night than the club.  The last time I went to a night club was in November 2013 I believe, when I went to a bear (furry gay men) bar with my boys.  (I EVENTUALLY got my sassy gay bestie; Sex and the City is real!)  The last time I was at a club that had men hitting on me? 2011, and the men were in their 40s because it was a grown folks club, and everybody was doing hustles and ballrooming (that might just be a Black mid-west thing, I’ll need a reader from California to confirm it).  And that shouldn’t even count because my best friend Josh glared at the [admittedly] middle-aged men who tried to approach me all night under the explanation, “He looks like he’d roofie you.”

So I was talking to my friends about my very calm view during what I now know were Soran’s confused years but at the time viewed as his misguided years with the simple fact that your hood rat period and your musique23 period cannot overlap.  And after they got done laughing and tumblr-ing my comments (due not a little to the fact that I actually named it after one of his exes, which meant that I was calling it a Dar’Queesha Phase) they agreed; you can’t rush a phase.

As I further pondered my hilarity afterwards, I came to one semi-sobering conclusion: Everyone goes through a Dar’Queesha phase.  It may not literally be a phase in which you only date hood women of the rat variety, but everyone goes through a phase in life in which they only have eyes for one particular type of love interest.  I went through one.  I wanted tall, light-skinned, and athletic for years.  My ideal man, Lamman Rucker (sorry baby, but the boy is FINE!), could have been jogging past my house topless and I would’ve missed him.  (We are going to ignore the fact that my Dar’Queesha phase occurred while I was around 16 and Lamman Rucker was already in his 30s.)  When you’re in your phase, your blinders go up and all other contenders kind of fade into the background.

I never was actually successful in acquiring my Dar’Queesha.  (side note: I think my auto correct is going to explode if I type that name one more time.)  Surprisingly, looking longingly across the cafeteria at someone does NOT actually create the air of mystique or even make the object of your affection think of you as anything other than “that tall girl with the dreads”.  Shamefully, the boy who broke my Dar’Queesha phase was so much worse: my school’s only “bad boy,” a drug dealer who made me laugh.  Did I date him?  Hell no, he just made me more aware that there were other guys out there.  Did I want to?  Kind of, but I’ve never really been into that whole “rough” men are attractive thing (a potential post!) so that affair was from afar only.  As, in retrospect, they all were until I was 20 and decided, Fuck it, I’ll just get a friend with benefits so SOMEBODY thinks I’m sexy, dammit!  (I wouldn’t recommend that course of action.)

Luckily, I grew out of my Dar’Queesha phase.  (Yup, my laptop has started smoking.)  It took me some time and another state, but I found guys of all hues who thought that I was funny and dateable and promptly started dating… a tall, light-skinned brotha who was NOT athletic so HA!  He did come out of the closet on my though, so I might lose some points on that…  (Me and my menagerie of gay men; another potential post!)  As most love affairs go, especially when both of the participants are attracted to the same sex but not actually the same sex, we broke up.  But Tony, he REALLY broke my mold.  And when I transferred universities and came back home to Detroit, that open mindedness to find a unique guy with no pre-desired potential characteristics (except funny, tall, and well-read; a girl has to have SOME standards people) eventually led me to my current relationship with Scott; my sweet, funny, and sexy otaku.  (That is his name.  I would give him a “we’ll call him” but honestly, its a pretty common name and if you don’t know me in person (WHO AM I!?), the chances of you finding my actual Scott out of all the masses is pretty damn slim.  And if you’re determined to anyway, well, while you’re doing Matrix-esq things on the internet, could you wipe my student loan balance clean for Sallie Mae?)

In the end, I’m glad Soran and I never hooked up.  Not only would that have made our friendship weird, but the period during which we could’ve dated, his Dar’Queesha phase, well, he deserved that.  Look, every guy I’m interested in isn’t a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity who reads to blind children in their spare time.  Hell, the man I’ve been with for a year isn’t like that.  But Scott, like Dar’Queesha serves a valuable purpose; they make us happy. (Again, confused in Soran’s instance, but you get my point.)  I wouldn’t have found my baby and be in the happy place I am now of watching anime and eating Chinese dumplings with my boyfriend if I hadn’t gone through my phase of utter foolishness when I was young.  My eyes were opened enough after my Dar’Queesha phase that when a totally different yet extremely more awesome guy came into my life, I could see and appreciate him for what he was.

And I still got to this point of self revelation without being a hood rat!  SHE BRINGS IT HOME FOR THE WIN!!