Hannah Lillith Assadi

“I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.”

“My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.”

“I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.”

“It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.”

“I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know.”

“We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That's why I named you Ahlam.”

“Find someone who loves you more than you love them.”

“We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.”

“We both knew no bounds to our escapism.”

“One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.”

“With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.”

“This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.”

“Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.'Look at his view,' my mother says.”

“Nightmares always recur, but never our most beautiful dreams.”

“I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.”

“I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.”

“There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.”