sometimes, it’s the cowards who don’t run.”

“Only cowards run away. I’m strong enough for this.”

These men had been on a different layer from me, but now I was up there too, and once you’ve been up there, the mechanisms would never be invisible again.

felt that Naima was making a jibe at my own life there, and it was unfair. Naima often made decisions this way, diving in headfirst, but she wasn’t recognizing that her impulsiveness was a privilege. She was only able to live like this because she’d always had someone to catch her on the other side. She’d grown up with a loving mother and a doting

And so I hope my feelings for Shiba, even though they contained a kind of adoration, did not resemble the love with which men smother and contain women, pinning them down like butterflies on a board, with their names underneath in elegant calligraphy.

Naima hadn’t “manifested” Azeem, she’d manufactured him. She’d created an image in her head and found someone to project it on, someone who, a bit of a blank, a bit of a people pleaser, happily accommodated her fantasies.

What Adam was witnessing were the remnants of a culture where once he was, by law, obeyed and pacified. That kind of “hospitality” was in fact a legacy of his people’s wrongdoing. Or maybe it went further back still; maybe it was this “hospitality” that gave colonizers the impression that they were welcome in the first place, to claim a land and pe

Did he not connect his whiteness to the special treatment he was receiving?

It made me paradoxically wish I could spend my whole life being single while also knowing that the singlehood was temporary.