A Woman is No Man

by Etaf Rum

A daughter was only a temporary guest, quietly awaiting another man to scoop her away, along with all her financial burden.

“Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s sabr, patience.”

She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

You had to finish a story to know all the answers, and life was no different. Nothing was ever handed to you from the start.

There’s no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary. Its discontent that drives creation the most—passion, desire, defiance. Revolutions don’t come from a place of happiness. If anything, I think it’s sadness, or discontent at least, that’s at the root of everything beautiful.”

“It says we attract what we think. Whatever belief a person has about the future comes true because the person believes it.”

Sadness was like a cancer, she thought, a presence that staked its claim so quietly you might not even notice it until it was too late.

But maybe that’s the way of life, Fareeda thought. To understand things only after they had passed, only once it was too late.

“The cruelest thing on this earth is a man’s heart.”

To want what you can’t have in this life is the greatest pain of all.”

It took more than one woman to do things differently. It took a world of them.