"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."

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

"He would kill you, but he would do it slowly"

"I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces."

""I 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."

"Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man"

"Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing"

"It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be."

"Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold."

"When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain."

"sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason."

"my dark day further darkened."

"for a moment I felt an intense desire to pass out and escape my life"

"was suspended in a place of no feeling,"

"The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy"

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

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

"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?"

"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."

"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 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?"

"I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true."

"I began to cry. Tears were so cheap now. How do some memories insist on themselves?"

"Ours was an ancient story, the woman wants the baby and the man doesn’t want the baby and a middle ground does not exist."

"The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations."

"We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference."

"Zikky, it won’t be easy, but it won’t be as hard as you think. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,"

"We mostly spoke English; Igbo was for mimicking relatives and for saying painful things."

"He grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him"

"Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals. It was my mother who sat beside my father at weddings and ceremonies; it was her photo that appeared above the label of “wife” in the booklet his club published in his honor. Respect was her reward for acquiescing."

"He said, “I thought you let me because you had protection.” I said, “What are you talking about? You know I stopped taking the pill because it made me fat, and I assumed you knew what it meant, what it could mean.” He said, “There was miscommunication."

"In my head, there was a queue of emotions I could not name, wanting to be tried out one after the other."

"A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside me and I was spurting fear."

"Only later did I see how, to survive, she wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife."

"was to remember like a brief blur my life as it once was, when I was only a daughter, not a mother."

"My father told jokes and laughed and charmed everyone, and broke things and walked on the shards without knowing he had broken things."

"I felt light from relief, weightless, unburdened."

"How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life."

"Symptoms can mean nothing if a mind just cannot."

"And I never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved."

"Her silence bruised the air between us."

"A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment."

"Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language."

"I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present."

"For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there."

"How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?"