Akwaeke Emezi

The girl broke into tears and all Kavita could feel was drained. It was
interesting, she thought, how people mourned Vivek. Somehow she felt like
they didn’t have the right to cry in front of her. After all, was it their son
who had died? Was it them that had held that baby on the day he was born?
No, it was just the two of them together in the hospital as Ahunna died, just
Kavita and her child in that bed, all mixed up in love and uncertainty, Chika
beside them like an afterthought. She regretted what had happened next—
the depression that followed, when she pulled away from her child in grief.
She should have held him tighter, as the world was whirling around them. It
had always been her and her baby.
The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly
that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once
he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that
he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel
that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they
cried in front of her as if it meant something. They’re still children, Kavita
tried to tell herself, not mature enough to do her the courtesy of keeping
their tears in their bedrooms, among their own complete families. But still
she thought of them as selfish brats without home training or compassion or
empathy, and this in turn made her angry at these girls she knew she still
loved, somewhere under the rage and pain and the grief that she felt
belonged to her and only her.