Mel’s Reviews > One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This > Status Update

And so we left; have been leaving ever since.

Your papers, he said.
My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor.
Your papers, he repeated.

[The Gulf War] transformed from a thing no one talked about to a normal mechanic of everyday life. ... The endless footage on CNN that at first provoked such shock- these shadowed Baghdad cityscapes detonating sporadically in balls of pale white light- soon caused no reaction at all. It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn't us.

[My daughter] wants to double-check the spelling of "welcome." I shut my computer, quickly. In various browser tabs, there is footage of a girl not much older than my daughter, pulled out of the rubble after an Israeli airstrike. In another is a recording of a girl begging for help, shortly before her execution ... I tell my daughter she spelled the word correctly. She returns to her park, light as air.