… and didn’t even get a eulogy, I knew for some of us it was too late to live. Me, I was too busy anyway writing love poems for someone I, well, loved. Everywhere I went it smelled of their hair, gingery and creamy. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. Fathers. It happened during the course of several weeks, it started with yours, then they died one by one, found usually by wives or workmates, never by us. We sat down together and renewed our old vow: We will become the boys our fathers always wanted, we will be better men than our fathers were.

I still know that someone whispered, But didn’t our fathers vow the same? It stuck in my head all night.We told ourselves we should go to their funerals. But in the same week I had to bury something else: the need to spend all future evenings with that person whom I loved and whose father was already dead, reading Adichie books to each other two chapters a night. Reading Purple Hibiscus. Admiring how the girl narrator talks about her abusive father. Love and violence in the same room.

That person whom I loved called their father an asshole person and didn’t even feel bad for saying men like that deserved to die. For them he was a reason not to be male, not to be masculine, not to be a man. I loved that person. They were not much taller than me and their hand fit perfectly in mine. And sometimes I felt like a boy with them but sometimes like a service.

We met again, our small group, all of us, united by the strange experience to have grown breasts and notice the difference. Someone dropped the words my body, my fault. The rest of us tossed our academic degrees and greatest achievements in a hat and someone said maybe we could buy some flowers with that. Tombstones, at least. We decided they should all read the same: ONE OF THOSE FATHERS.

Going home I thought of love, what are the chances, and felt giddy for no reason, probably because you can still dance atop all the filth. Anyway, I reserved crying exclusively for lovers or crushes. Never for family members or friends. It didn’t seem odd until you pointed it out, now I ask myself what should be wrong with that. Don’t you feel that disgust when thinking about the men in your family. Waves of nausea. You reply, ‚the one wrong thing would be resembling him‘, another added: ‚the one wrong thing would be resenting him‘. I guess I am guilty of both but didn’t drink myself to death like I had planned in those cases. So I had time for love. Made it. Lost it again. At one point there were graves, I remember that clearly, and I thought that my dead body would not be swept under the carpet so easily.