She too would begin to revisit the past once it had grown a little, and she would dwell on it for hours—even were it to consist of nothing but misery. Her wounds would heal and she would retain only what was best. In any case, for me to stop living in the past, it would have to be dead. And it clearly wasn’t—the past was alive and well, in one form or another, and it not only coexisted with the present, but continued to wrangle with it. [...] Was I really escaping the present and seeking refuge in the past, as she alleged? Even if it were true, was there shame in it when the present was no more than a booby- trapped snare full of car bombs, brutality, and horror? Perhaps the past was like the garden which I so loved and which I tended as if it were my own daughter, just in order to escape the noise and ugliness of the world. My own paradise in the heart of hell, my own ‘autonomous region’ as I sometimes liked to call it. I would do anything to de- fend that garden, and the house, because they were all I had left.
*
My youth was not her youth, her time and my time were worlds apart. Her green eyes fluttered open to the ravages of war and sanctions; deprivation, violence, and displacement were the first things she tasted in life. I, on the other hand, had lived in prosperous times, which I still remembered and continued to believe were real.
*
We repeated and clung to those words like an invocation but our faith in them was quite different.
*
I'm trying to remember a time when I haven't felt alienated, smothered, or, as now, destitute. To me, our exodus from the house of al-Dawra didn't take place all at once in the summer of 2007. Rather, it was one of an unbroken sequence of events that spannned many years. It's as if chunks of me were lopped off or stolen by bit, until nothing was left.
*
[...] I felt that I had no happy time to look back on.