Laura’s Reviews > We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir > Status Update

...being queer, I learned, is so much more than who you sleep with. It's who you are, whether that means rejecting traditional gender roles or embracing non-normative identities and politics.

...but not knowing whether we'd be able to make next month's rent didn't ease my mind either. We had our asylum and our government-issues blankets, but I still didn't feel free to be a child.

I wanted to scream "I'm going back to Pakistan!" or cry out for my dad as my toddler brother had taken to doing, but I held my tongue. I didn't want to sound ungrateful; I knew how difficult it had been to arrange this move. But to me it seemed we'd simply traded one set of anxieties for another. Sure, we were no longer afraid of being killed by religious extremists on our way to school....

..often I spent time in the park alone, lingering among the rose bushes. The smell reminded me of lying in our lush garden back home, where I would water the roses during the hot summer months and think to myself, This is where I would like to die Maybe that was a morbid thought for a kid my age, but not so surprising for someone who so deeply craved permanency- after all, what was more permanent than death?