Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

I read about men who as boys were separated from the girls in sex ed class, and were never taught about the bodies of girls.

“Can you believe an elected US official actually asked why women can’t hold their periods in?” I laughed, and so did he, but I remembered now his first fleeting reaction, the slightest of hesitations, as though he was holding back from saying, “You mean they can’t?”

It felt self-flagellating, as though I were looking for a reason to excuse him, but the alternative was to accept that the Kwame I knew was a lie. My head pounded and throbbed, and my

crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.

the boy

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

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.

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.

I began to call her my father’s other wife, because people assumed “second wife” was the woman my father had married when he was no longer married to my mother.