But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

I found myself sitting at the computer, and I thought I was going to write a kind of simple nostalgic story about two boys and their love of kite fighting. But stories have a will of their own, and this one turned out to be this dark tale about betrayal, loss, regret. The short story which was about 25 pages long sat around for a couple of years.