I sit alone in the dim, book-lined room waiting for the phone to ring. Outside, a hot Indiana summer drags its swampy feet. I stare at my smartphone’s screen. The time, neat numbers superimposed on a picture of my daughter, stares back. My thoughts are steeped in the past, and so the device feels strangely alien and incongruous in my hands. Then it rings, and a man’s voice reaches out into the stillness of the room. It is a voice I have not heard for nearly twenty-five years. It is a voice I have not heard since the day I was married.
“You didn’t wait for me,” he says.
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contributor
contributor
Rafia Zakaria is the author, most recently, of Against White Feminism (2021), which has been translated into four languages. She is a fellow at the African American Policy Forum, an intersectional think tank.
