Zikora

If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

You can’t nice your way to being loved.

I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold

Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.

I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.

How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,

They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done.

Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:

The frequent flare of sad longing.

I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone.

Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.

It was possible that a sophisticated

When my grandmother died, I called him crying, and he said, “Sorry,” and then in the next breath, “Has your period ended so I can stop by?” My period had not ended and so he did not stop by. I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.

He often said, “I don’t do commitment,” with a rhythm in his voice, as though miming a rap song, but I didn’t hear what he said; I heard what I wanted to hear: he hadn’t done commitment yet.

I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved.

Some days I was fine and some days I was underwater, barely breathing.

I didn’t question whether it was real, because I knew it was. I questioned where it had gone. How could emotions just change? Where did it go, the thing that used to be?

It had never occurred to me not to have the baby, and he must have heard it in my voice. The knowledge came to him as an already-sealed box.

Each morning, I coated concealer on the dark bags under my eyes. Most days, I caressed a bottle of Advil, longing for the translucent green pills, but knowing that I would never take them.

I made myself boneless and amenable. I spent weekends willing the landline next to my bed to ring. Often it didn’t. Then he would call, before midnight, to ask if I was still up, so he could visit and leave before dawn.

think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.

I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace.

he rolled his eyes in a kind of disbelieving amusement. “What, the single friend will seduce the husband, or the single friend will make the wife want to be single again?

What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.

What did “It’s time to get married” mean, anyway? Why did she have to marry at all?

The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false-eyelash policy.