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Maybe she was one of those people for whom satisfaction lay only in the future, forever slightly out of reach.
Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered.
It had been clear to her since puberty that the extent of her desires would not be judged suitable. Boys were supposed to want sex, and she was to fend them off; that was what good girls did so they would not disgrace their families.
But the closer she had gotten to earning a medical degree, the more it seemed to pale into nothingness in their estimation, since she didn’t have a man waiting to marry her when she was done.
She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.
The scars will fade, but what you learn is yours for life. Nobody can take your certificates from you.
The feeling he had considered strange earlier settled into him and he finally recognised it as the lightness of being that came with freedom. Freedom from the worry and fear that stalked him, because he never knew if his parents would be able to afford something he needed.
Why had it taken both of them so long to become the parents he needed?
Wúràọlá screamed until her voice was gone and she couldn’t even whimper. No one came.
What annoyed her was how, after he’d used her body to mop his floor tiles, he was still confident that she would not want to delay moving in with him.
Was this who she was now? A woman he could take for granted even when he’d behaved abominably to her?
It was easy to predict how he might respond if she broke up with him now. He would plead with her and argue; then he would smash her head against the wall. He had not gone that far yet, but she knew now that he could. She was going to break up with him before he did.
She was leaving him. All the complications that could arise from her decision lapped at the edges of her mind, but she focused on this one thought. She was going to leave him. There was no joy in it, no sense of liberation; there was no sorrow either. There was only a nothingness for which she was grateful, a numbness she hoped would stay in her for as long as possible.
When a buffalo walks over a hard-rock outcrop, We do not see his footprints. When a heavy rain falls over a hard-rock outcrop, We do not see the footprints of the rain.
