Shame is the power we give others to wield over us.

The power of science. Sometimes she thought how one day even love might become like a science. Everyone saying exactly the same right words. Everyone reacting the same exact ways. Love feeling and tasting and looking exactly the way some scientists in some laboratory determined that it should. Perhaps a development like that would solve many romantic disputes, maybe even bring down divorce rates to a cool zero percent.

… if we don’t care enough about our own country to take care of it, then why should we expect anyone else to care?”“The rest of the world still has a moral obligation to care…” “All right, so the UK and the US should tell us again how to run our own country? Bring back colonialism?

Chinasa continued to imagine the girl, a small, veil-wearing child with fear written all over her face, running for dear life. Soon she could see herself as the girl, running and running like the girl. But there was only so far her imagination could take her: She herself had never been a runner. And anyway, how fast did one have to run to outrun a bomb?

She smiled just a little, as if to hide how powerful the words made her feel, but Chinasa saw it all the same: the way her face seemed to say that she had gotten the vengeance she sought. The kind of vengeance that turned love into a weapon. Tit for tat. You do me, I do you.

If theirs was a goal of arriving at versions of themselves that they deemed better—perhaps more valuable—than their current selves, then who could blame them? And yet, they were in fact to be blamed.

Suddenly she could see her future in the relationship: a lifetime of feeling like an afterthought.

Wasn’t it the belief, after all, that women looked more beautiful during ovulation—or more gorgeous, if you would? At least there was an upside.