On Rotation

by Shirlene Obuobi

After all, Frederick had been playing the Nice Guy game for weeks now—the one little boys play when they want to break up with their perfectly fine girlfriends but don’t want to bear the responsibility of hurting her feelings, and so drag things out and misbehave until the girl loses patience and breaks it off first.

He’d been mean, when all he’d had to be was honest.

He was sixty-something years old, of the generation that remembered scorched churches and sundown towns, and every young Black person’s success seemed to loosen the scars left by the state-sanctioned violence he had endured in his youth.

Old Black people were always proud of me.

My version of Momma had been convinced that simply looking upon the image of a shirtless man was enough to get me pregnant.

Or maybe she had simply been born with the more acceptable set of characteristics. Most people knew how to love a girl like her. They didn’t really know what to do with one like me.

angst over every decision I make. It took me years to build up the courage to just say fuck it and do what I wanted to, you know?

Don’t think too hard about things. Just live in the moment.

You are a Black woman with a low Step score. They are going to use that to confirm their bias that Black students underperform.”

“You’re a strong student. You’re going to do great things.”

Who the fuck did any of these men who

played games with the hearts of women like we weren’t real, breathing, feeling people deserving of respect think they were?

You care too much about what Mom and Dad think of you, Tabatha had said once. You just have to tune them out.

I wasn’t familiar with death. Being an ocean away from most of our relatives meant that the passing of a family member was something Tabatha and I experienced only in abstract.

“It is not your job to decide whether or not your dad is worth saving,” I said. “Your job is to support her.”

“You’re like a cartoon character. Everything comes out through the face. The rest through your hands.”

Maybe that’s why I’d avoided it, why I’d let myself sit and stew in my bitterness instead of trying to keep myself from failing my next shelf.

I was going to do whatever I wanted, and I was going to do it well, and when my work was finally done, everyone who tried to hold me back would look upon the spoils of my labor and know that they’d screwed up.

Well, we were exciting in theory, interesting as a concept.

Bright and shiny when we were new and our outspokenness was “refreshing” and our exoticness* exhilarating.

“I don’t think I’m not enough,” I said plainly. “I think I’m too much.”

Possessiveness wasn’t the same as love. It wasn’t the same as commitment. It was easy to want my exclusive attention, harder to give anything worthwhile back.

Just because he didn’t want me didn’t mean that no one else could shoot their shot.

He would just play with me like he was doing now and tell me that he hadn’t meant it that way if I slipped up and tried to assign any amorous intent to his actions.

How do you love someone who hurts you over and over again?

And here was Ricky, going into detail, identifying what I liked most about myself and telling me he liked it too.

Learning restraint. Learning how to go home to an empty apartment, and to interface with friends like this—in stolen moments at work, or in the line for lunch, not sitting at a creaky old dining room table for hours.

The secret to long-lasting love is simple. You wake up. You roll over and look at your wife. And you say to yourself, today, I will choose you. I will love you. And you keep doing that every single day until you die.’”

“That finding someone to love you romantically is actually kind of easy,” Nia said. “There’s a whole cocktail of brain chemicals at work telling you to obsess over this other person. Plus a rulebook for relationships we’ve all been given since infancy. Friendship doesn’t have any of that, and so finding a person who will hold you down for no reason is rare.

a nice ride, a fun time. The girl who taught you something about yourself, who you looked back on fondly while you cuddled up with the woman you decided to actually love in the end.

“You can’t do relationship shit with me and then tell me you’re not ready for a relationship.

was what love was supposed to feel like: uplifting, encouraging, renewing. If I had to let go of a love that was not quite that, that was okay. Because I loved myself, and these women had taught me how.

“You were disrespectful to me. I won’t tolerate that. Being family doesn’t get

you a free pass to talk to me however you’d like.”

“All these friends you have spoiled you. You expect people to know exactly how to love you on the spot,”

Look at the behavior, not the words, Angela.”

“You frustrate me. So much. But you also make me better. I like who I become when I’m with you.”