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without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of bafflement at how to go about doing so,
what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human,
she watched, a bit surprised, as Saeed got out of bed and prayed.
With that he was gone, and his London was gone, and how long he remained in Namibia it was hard for anyone who formerly knew him to say.
she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled,
The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city.
Nothing changed. Always people looking to harm
“That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”
to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.
To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop,
the natives and their forces stepped back from the brink.
Compare to Israel in Gaza.
In the formerly protected greenbelt around London a ring of new cities was being built, cities that would be able to accommodate more people again than London itself.
promised forty meters and a pipe: a home on forty square meters of land and a connection to all the utilities of modernity.
possessed of a limitless patience that was matched by a limitless sorrow.
When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched,
the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another,
We are all migrants through time.
depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself,
