Other Words for Home

by Jasmine Warga

and I just want to live in a country where we can all have dinner again without shouting about our president or rebels and revolution.

Life is not good for everyone. You only think it is good because that is what you have been told. You need to open your eyes, Issa says.

Those men who spill blood and manipulate the Quran to say things that the rest of us know it does not say.

Our town used to be a place for people to laugh and enjoy all the things that unite them like

family and sunshine and the sea and good food. Not the things that divide them like opinions and political loyalties. But now everyone wants to know where you stand. What you think. What you believe.

I’m going to have to learn how to be brave. We’re all going to have to learn.

America, like every other place in the world, is a place where some people sleep and some people other people dream.

Americans love labels. They help them know what to expect. Sometimes, though, I think labels stop them from thinking.

It is part surprise, and part waiting. It is all unknown.

we are lucky to be here when so many others aren’t. But we don’t understand the luck of why or how just the luck.

They force you to fill in the hard parts, the things they are not brave enough to say.

Jude, those parts aren’t for girls like us. What do you mean? We’re the type of girls that design the sets, that stay backstage. We’re not girls who glow in the spotlight.

I sometimes worry that there is something wrong with me that I so badly want to know that other people see me.

that I don’t, belong in whatever classroom I end up in.

but I do understand what it’s like to not fit in. To have people look at you like you’re different and weird and like that’s somehow a bad thing.

Americans think it’s normal for there to be violence in places where people like me are from, where people like me and people who look like me live.