The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan

by Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller

The beautiful table with all the lavish food made me feel odd. Eating such delicious food when there were so many people with so little to eat, people I knew by name, whose faces I could see clearly in my mind, seemed wrong. I set my fork down; my discomfort was so overwhelming. My body was here, sitting at this beautiful dining table, but my soul couldn’t forget the country we had just traversed. I couldn’t get thoughts of Mina out of my mind, and the freedom fighters struggling for their lives in the freezing mountains.

For nearly a year, I had run with my friends through the muddy lanes of a rambling tent city and lived on crusts of bread and milk with my sisters and Zia in a tiny hotel room, always teetering on the very edge of a fierce hunger. That seemed to be the world most people lived in every day of their lives.

He waved his hands back up toward the trees. “What you see is what love looks like. They can touch each other, yet they don’t irritate or enrage each other. All throughout the world, love

speaks to us, what it means to cherish and be kind and to respect each other. If we miss the message, we will get lost. We will lose out on what’s important.”

thought of boys like I thought about my brothers: they were a lot of help when you needed them and annoying inconveniences the rest of the time.