Òyì nke e mepụtara

You can live with someone for years without knowing them. Or rather, you can live with them and know the surface of them, what they order at restaurants, how they take their coffee, the way they clear their throat when they're about to deliver bad news, and you can mistake all of that knowing for intimacy when it isn't intimacy at all. Amy Tan's line is from a novel about sisters and past lives and things that can't be explained, but this sentence sits inside a failed marriage, and it says somet