Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. 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.”

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

apartment key in an envelope, the lone metal

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.

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

Respect was her reward for acquiescing.