Status Updates From Paradiso 17

If you give up hope, son, you lose everything. Remember that. Even now, I have hope that one day you shall return to the land of your fathers even if I will not. Remember, you have the strength of a lion.

Thankfully there was always a cat waiting for Sufien in every new homeland, a cat who returned his gaze as all cats do, with eyes borrowed from ghosts.

.. The Nakba was a catastrophe. It could never be romanticized. Didn’t they realize that prosperous times are treacherous in that they obscure the coming misfortune, Sufien protested. The worst of times, those times when true survival is at stake, are allowed to just be beautiful, because there is no other option: rejoice in the beauty that remains or succumb to death.