I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.

Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there.

Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

What did exclusivity ever have to offer but a distorted, unrealistic view of the world? People who stuck only to their own kind were scared people.