Status Updates From I'll Tell You When I'm Home...

too real, too familiar

"In you are both my grandmothers’ rebellious blood, following men, escaping wars, from one country to another, my mother’s leavings, my aunts’. The rage and humiliation and exile. In you is the harm and rejoicing and help of generations of women. In you live the people that made you. All of them. I wouldn’t give you another story even if I could, for this is the one that bore you...."

"My mother, who still believed her old life would be returned to her, any minute now, like a borrowed book someone had kept too long."

'One afternoon, a professor stopped me in the hallway and asked if I was okay.

“I just heard some things,” he said when I asked why. He glanced around him. “But you’re a nice girl, right.”'

Eww what 🤢

"Beirut then isn’t Beirut today. The girls who had sex were known by name. The boys talked. The girls talked even more. But mostly I wonder if he’d have felt a responsibility for what was to come. If the same cultural laws that would destroy me could have protected me. If he’d known, would he have felt the need to keep me out of the mouths of others, as the aunties say."

Nope