Maybe it’s true that we become what we love most, that we exalt the nameless by losing ourselves in it.

Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots, she said. Now, thirty thousand feet above him, I am trying to untangle the knot he left in me. He said one day I’d tell our story back to him. But my words are wild country, and I don’t have a map.

But Baba used to say you should pray the most when you can’t see the good in the world. And I know I should say a prayer because, after all, God is God, and today is a day we should thank him. So I try to remember the prayers Baba used to whisper in our old apartment, and the prayers Mama said when she took me to Mass, and then I add my own because I know that God listens, even if you don’t get the words exactly right.

We face each other, two candles flickering. Sami’s sweat smells of chamomile and musk. When we dance, I am a bird shaking loose the night from its wings. I kiss him, my hand behind his jaw, his hands in my hair. He gasps into my mouth and goes soft as water, our bodies molten glass that I am shaping with my kiss, and I wonder if it’s true that there is nothing on this earth that is not born of the sweet ache of flame.

We rarely know,′ Khaldun said, ‘when we try to do good, if the outcomes of our actions will actually be good.’ He laughed to himself. ‘Perhaps God plans it that way, to teach us the the planning is best left to him.

To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doesn’t know my name.

I listen to them talk in a language I’ve never heard before. I don’t have to understand everything. The blue-violet voices wind around me, protecting me from my fear. I am covered with a think rind of safety, like an orange.

Nobody can love the stars and hurt people. They just can’t.

I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.

That wondrous journey fixed in my mind the idea of a wide world, full of dangers and beautiful things. I loved that world, in spite of its crushing vastness. I loved it in spite of the terrible weight of its hope.” An oasis with a fortified outpost appeared.