The city is largely unchanged from her childhood and it never before occurred to Mazna that there’s something precious in this, that she once fought with Lara in front of the same downtown statue where she was briefly lost as a child while shopping with her mother. Damascus remains the same as it was for her grandmother and her grandmother, and Mazna knows it will always be. The truth is she can’t unsee herself in relation to the city. No fantasy of leaving for California or London is complete without the fantasy of return; she can imagine herself returning transformed to the corner grocery
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