The Centre

by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

so much gratitude and admiration when a white person speaks a non-white language and only contempt and indignation for non-white people who don’t speak English. The

“Be settled in yourself first. And in your work. And with God,” Amma said. “That way you’ll never feel desperate.”

‘To love without wanting to devour must surely be anorexic.’”

while discounting our non-romantic relationships (if such distinctions can even be made), often more enduring and authentic. We discard them as soon as some man comes along, flashing his teeth and brandishing his penis. But it’s always the friends in the end, isn’t it, who remain to pick up the pieces when the men have gone, leaving destruction in their wake?

Friends and family will not gather, ever, to celebrate my partnership with Naima—there will be no anniversaries or acknowledgments, no congratulatory cards, no celebratory ceremonies. And yet, it is this slow burning love of female friendship that actually keeps the world turning.

The body, I started to see, was a memory keeper. It knew everything.

“The narcissism of small differences.” That’s a term coined by Freud. “Der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen.” It means, I think, that when two things are very similar, you end up inflating the small differences between them far more than you would the larger differences between two less similar things.