I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.

I feel like we [americans] are a unique nation in this world, in that we are able to implement great change in our society over a relatively short period of time. What takes centuries in Europe, we accomplish in a generation.

The Kite Runner is a story of two boys and a father, and the strange love triangle that binds them.

You say their stories, it is gift they give you.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).