Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

The friend I could unapologetically talk to about everything was gone. But gone where?

Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you

mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of ...

a large plastic bag from the hospital labeled Patient Things,

Moving on. It’s a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn’t, how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it’s starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has

become unendurable.

I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.