Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

Her expression did not change. So he persevered, clinging to his grin with the mounting desperation of a doomed rock climber: “I think it’s personal. Each of us has his own way. Or . . . her own way. Nobody’s perfect. And, in any case—”

unchewed chewing gum.

Why the clarification of unchewed?

grown

Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.

he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life only appears for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.

when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

once begun such cycles are difficult to break, in fact the opposite, as if each makes the threshold for irritation next time a bit lower, as is the case with certain allergies.

when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.

there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere,

personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.

their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

We are all migrants through time.

the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on,

staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived,