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I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.
What if female arousal is just the belief that you will not die at this man’s hands?
The more fucking a girl has done, the shyer she pretends to be. It is a rule. But I will extract their names from her in time.
He is punishing me for something, and I am letting him. He is weaponizing all his losses against me, and I am wanting the abuse, or, at the very least, accepting it as mine. After years of claiming Arabness as an excuse for what I am—hairy, hard-boned and dirt-skinned, sensual, impulsive, superstitious, nostalgic, full of body-shame and estrangement—I feel I’m earning it at last.
Nice sadness but don’t feed it. Its tummy is holey, so it’s always hungry. If you feed it, it will befriend you and will return every night to beg like a street dog.
If the beast is already in your house, does that make the wilderness safer?
Mama, why do so many men grow their pinky nails to such witchy lengths?
wait they do it too, is it an african thing
Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.
It’s not over, is what I’m saying. Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.
What are borders, anyway? Just lines in the sand. What are citizens? Just people fucking within the same lines in the sand—and their children and then their children, I tell William, who is standing behind me in the kitchen, running his teeth along my neck while I peel and de-heart late guavas.
we arrived at my building, I thanked the
Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.
I sensed that he needed to believe I was light-skinned to feel right dating me. For all his talk of Black love between Black bodies, he liked me. He liked girls that looked like me: Desis, Arabs, Blasians, and other mixed chicks who were pigmented enough to be lassoed into a broad category of Blackness, if he chose to, if he named them queens before they could name themselves, dark enough not to feel like an outright betrayal of his people or his politics or his self.
It was an accident, but she handicapped me to a lifetime of scoffing at the very things I need. There is such a thing as princely poverty.
TRULY THE MOST DEPRESSING KIND OF RELATIONSHIP is one where the blood runs in both directions and it’s unclear who is to blame.
and an ugly man, bald as a urinal,29 circling a drain nearby.
He could not contain himself: I’ve never met anyone as cold as you, you’re not human, you’re not even a woman. A stranger attacked you and you’re not even upset, I’m still shaking and you— I spooned out the sugar, then opened the fridge door for a sprig of fresh mint.
It wasn’t funny anymore. I have to be gentle now that I’m refusing him. But there isn’t a gentle way to say no to a man who knows he is being told no and continues in a pleading manner.
The fool cannot register terror on the face of a woman he is actively loving.
The man is laboring at you, he hammers into you like this is his job, like he gets paid to hammer.
