Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

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

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.