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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them - for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything.

Her love for us was deep as well as exclusive, and the pain it caused us as we submitted to it was a reflection of her own conflicts. She was very open to wounds — she was capable of chewing over a reproof or a criticism for thirty or forty years - and her diffused indwelling resentment made itself apparent in aggressive forms of behavior.

In the end, what broke the spell of misery was being told it would end.

I don’t know if I love the desert or my father loves the desert or what, if anything, is the difference.

I wish I could take my self off like a coat. Just for an hour. Just for an afternoon. I’ll come back, I want to promise.

Their desire, soured, turns into rage; the women in my family wear their resentments like bracelets. They will tell you all about them.
They will ruin dinner. They will tell you about your father's family, how they are less cultured or more arrogant, how they never liked them. They will blame their misery on the men.

I am feral with that fear: there is nothing I won't do not to feel it.
Which means I am fated to keep feeling it. Watching him pour himself water, take off his shoes, I am overwhelmed by it, I can see nothing but it: the being left. I am left in a way that feels boundless. There is no bound because he always returns. The rage comes with a kind of seeing: how his eyes dart around the room like a trapped animal.

This is where I run when he is gone, to the past, to the last person I was before him. I pretend to stretch in front of the building, wait for the light to come on, wait to see the outline of a figure. I never do. And what would I do if it appeared? The waiting is a pretense. There is a part of me that believes I'm still there, that if I called my name, I'd emerge.

A list is a magnificent thing, all that future in one place. It is the concretization of hope, not only that something will get done, but that you will be the one to do it. Sometimes, if I realize I've completed a task without having put it on the list, I'll go back and write it, just to cross it off. The pathos in this seems sweet, childlike, a delight in both archiving and putting to rest.

The loss was the kind that filled, not drained.
The kind that filled my mouth with sour when I woke in the middle of the night, remembering. I'd left Beirut promising Meimei I'd return. Instead, I stayed, choosing America, a white man, a life veneered with case. I watched their illnesses from continents away, their disappearings, their deathbeds and burials missed.

These are the moments I shine: crises, emergencies, a near-pathological calm slinking over me like a slip. I like being needed.
I like the attention, but there's something else to it—the calm that reminds me of sharply made hotel beds, the satisfaction of order, a knife slicing cleanly into fruit. If I do something myself, I don't have to wonder how it was done.

Die Menschen bleiben einander fremd. Sie sind wie Inseln, verbunden höchstens über ein Buch, das durch viele Hände und Sprachen wandert. Manchmal denke ich, die Sprachen selbst, die Laute, die Zeichen, haben mehr Gemeinsamkeiten und sind gemeinschaftsfähiger als die Menschen, die sie benutzen.