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How come people only ever have one language for grief?
But I feel all those things, the not-homeness of this city, the way nobody hangs blankets from their balconies in New York, the way Central Park had maples instead of date palms, how there are no pizza shops or pretzel carts on the streets here. How Arabic sounds funny in my mouth.
“You have to weave two stories together to tell them both right.” She presses her palms together, then opens them. “Like two hands.”
After the boom, a plume of gray dust came up like ink in a glass of water. I felt scared then, but only in the way you feel when you watch a thunderstorm pass by; as long as it’s far away, you aren’t afraid of getting struck.
“As any poet knows,” Khaldun said, “the story often matters less than the telling.”
“People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you.”
“Then stories map the soul,” Rawiya said, “in the guise of words.”
Someday I’ll have lived out of New York longer than I lived in New York.
is there still space in the world for extraordinary things?
“Sometimes I feel like all the people I’ve ever met are still with me. Like they’re right around the corner and they’ll pop out any second.” “That sounds nice.” “You know it’s not.”
“Must there be a lesson?” al-Idrisi said. “Perhaps the story simply goes on and on.
