Eating Dreams
Reflections on exile, memory, and the traps of symbolic identity.
οἶδ’ ἐγὼ φεύγοντας ἄνδρας ἐλπίδας σιτουμένους
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hopeAeschylus
I made mujadarah the other night. It’s a spiced (not spicy) lentil pilaf that, when made to my mother’s specifications, transports me to my happy place.
It was a failure.
The lentils broke down, the rice got soggy, and something about the mix of aromatics was ever-so-slightly yet fatally wrong. Everything was just… off. And I knew it from the aroma, even before the first bite. An uncanny valley of flavor: familiar but wrong.
I cook a lot. Some of it is habit, some of it is hunger, and very often it is homesickness. Taste and smell have always been for me the fastest way to a sense of time and place. Even now, in my fifties, I still find myself chasing certain dishes — not for their taste exactly, but for moments and places they remind me of. Or promise to. I want the smell of something real. Something rooted. Something that whispers, “You’re from here.” But food only gets you so far. The deeper hungers — the ones shaped by absence, by narrative, by the world’s indifference — are harder to feed.
My mother taught me to cook in a way that all mothers teach: not through measurement or mechanics, but by sentiment. My mother’s recipes were feelings. Measures of gut instincts and vibes. Rituals of the hand and wrist. “Nitfet bharat,” she’d say — “a pinch of seven spice.” “Shwayet irfeh” — “a bit of cinnamon.” “Enough salt in the water that an egg will float.” My mother cooked like a jazz musician: improvising around a melody only she could hear.
When I cook now, I try to find that key and follow the tune. But even when I replicate the steps perfectly — hit every note, measure for measure — it quite often still feels wrong. Like playing a Coltrane solo note-for-note, you can build the body but still miss the sacred breath. No heart. No feel. I can follow the rhythm. But not the soul.
That’s an outcome that I know all too well as an exile. Where you can build all the pieces of a ‘home’, follow all the steps, include all the ingredients you know by heart, and fill it with people who matter to you and to whom you matter, and yet still, as close as it gets, it’s a simulation that still doesn’t quite taste like home.
Exile isn’t just about geography. It’s about dissonance. It’s about making something with love and muscle memory and grief and still finding it doesn’t quite land. It’s about the irretrievable — the flavor you almost remember, the place you almost had, the version of yourself that almost made sense.
Exile is an insatiable hunger. Not metaphor or gauzy abstraction, but a gnawing, physical insistence that eats at that part of you that’s just a few inches to the left of the place you carry your broken dreams.
It is an open-mawed mewling hunger that you can’t feed with falafel or hummus or rosewater-scented pastries. An ache that you can’t quiet with bedtime tales of longing and loss.
It’s a gluttonous hunger that dreams of feasting on the never-happening, the almost-was, and the might-have-been.
The cruel trick of my exile is that I was taught to yearn for what was lost and have ended up starving for a taste of what can never be.
Exile doesn’t just strip you of home — it strips you of narrative. You end up, like Tantalus, reaching for fruit that dissolves at a touch, trying to write your story while the world erases each word before the ink dries. Everyone has a pen. Everyone has a different outline. And somehow, you must make sense of it all.
There’s a silent film from 1924 with an ending that’s been stuck in my mind for the three decades since I saw it: Greed, by Erich von Stroheim. In its final moments, two men are handcuffed together in the middle of Death Valley. One kills the other, realizing too late that he’s condemned himself to die with the corpse he’s created. It’s overwrought, sure. But it’s also, in its way, prophecy.
That’s the shape and the structure of my exile.
If you’re born Palestinian but born outside of and after the flickering moment of Palestine to parents who are themselves exiles, themselves caromed with you across lines on a map by the shifting and baroque architecture of history (which is to say, violence), then what you inherit is not just a hunger for a place but also a hunger for a story.
It’s a dizzying narrative vertigo where your bones whisper one thing and your passport and mailing address shout another.
Adding painful insult to historical injury, the people around you, wherever around you happens to be at that particular phase of your eternal migration, don’t quite see you. Or worse, they do but mistake you for something else entirely.
I was born in Heliopolis. Cairo’s City of the Sun. A name so grand, so mythic, that it feels like a satirical dig. And in a way, it may be. The name Heliopolis implies clarity, illumination, and centrality, and my birth was anything but.
I was born de-centered, granted the Ottoman deeds and rusty keys to the outline of a something that was long gone. I am the heir to an absence. The unpapered citizen of a Palestine that had already begun to exist only as an addictive mix of rightful grievance, bone-deep grief, and a resigned resentment at the world’s apathy by the time I drew my first breath.
My father, born in a Palestinian Jerusalem, still referred to it as home. My mother, born in a Palestinian Nablus, did too. But they weren’t allowed to return — not really — and so their home was always an abstraction, a concept.
We Palestinians are the living proof of Thomas Wolfe’s hypothesis; we literally can’t go home again.
And so, my exile begins as a genetic injury forged in the fusion fire of colliding recessive alleles for loss and homesickness.
I have lived in many places: Kuwait, the United Kingdom, Jordan, and the United States. Each one tacked into the fabric of my identity with a rough, uneven thread that pulls too tight in some places and hangs loose in others. Each stitch pulls differently through new cloth, old cloth, borrowed cloth, and layers my life into a patchwork of experiences that define the Josephic Dreamcoat that I wear as I walk the earth like Kung Fu’s Caine, “till God puts me where he wants me to be.”
But none of the patches on that coat have ever given me the thing that people mean when they talk about home. That casual intimacy people mean when they talk about home — the kind of home that doesn’t ask you, But, where are you really from?
Kuwait was only ever transient and transactional, a weirdly plastic Disneyland of petrodollars, refugees, and expats.
The UK was cold, both socially and meteorologically. In this, the era before the push for multiculturalism, the message was clarion clear: You will never be English, but you had very much better bloody try to be.
Jordan was so close culturally and geographically, but, delicious irony, the place where you are most forced, as a Palestinian person, to sublimate those parts of yourself. To tuck it away, or dilute it, or make it less inconvenient. The Western tendency to collapse Jordanians and Palestinians into one tidy category might work well for facile op-eds or mealy-mouthed diplomats, but anyone who’s actually lived inside those identities knows better. Yes, we’re similar. But similarity only heightens the stakes of difference. Freud’s Narcissism of Small Differences explains so much with surgical precision. Hic sunt dracones, amice.
Adulthood in the United States was the first time things even hinted at being better. My first year here, in Boston, brought something that was not comfort or belonging exactly. In retrospect, I think it was a joy in a sense of anonymity. A feeling of not mattering. A sense of spaciousness. A liberating feeling rooted in the idea that here, no one knows you, no one cares, and everyone’s kind of doing their own thing. A moment that said, Unclench your fists, think what you want, choose which parts of yourself to show and which to keep folded quietly in your coat pocket. I wanted to be seen. I also wanted to disappear.
Boston taught me how to become scrutable — readable, familiar, and just foreign enough to be interesting, but never enough to be troubling. A Palestinian who smiled just enough to put people at ease, who offered critique in doses small enough not to disturb digestion. Who wore his displacement lightly, tastefully, intellectually, and never wound it too tight around the neck. Because while America didn’t demand erasure, it did ask for a little sanitization. A little performance. A little translation. And I obliged.
Transferring to Berkeley came closest to something like belonging. There was air there. Big air. Big, wide-open space to ask big questions. To say the things I couldn’t say anywhere else. But even then, I was performing to the edges of the version of myself that the environment could accommodate. Hospitality, understanding, and acceptance aside, the inner master who cosplays as a slave stands just behind the exile, whispering his quiet warning to the stateless: “Memento peregrinum esse. You will be ever the guest. Yes, the door is open. But this is not your house.”
I often don’t want to be Palestinian. That’s not something rooted in a sense of shame; I am, and have always been, deeply proud of my heritage and culture. It’s a desire parented by the consummated union of Exhaustion and Hopelessness.
It’s a shitty and thankless gig, being a Palestinian. It’s not a job people are rushing to apply for. How much easier it would be to walk the world as a Laotian, or a Nepali, or a Costa Rican, or a Swiss? To never have to explain, to defend, or represent? To never have to help translate the idiom of pain and loss into a digestible expression for those who do not even understand the equation? To never have to wear the responsibility of staying unflinchingly friendly, inoffensive, and generous in the face of aggressive interrogations and dismissals that question your right to exist in your identity? To never carry the grief, or worse, the expectation of grief?
It clings to you, your Palestinian-ness. Like wet clothes. Like a birthmark — unseen until someone winces and asks, What happened to your face?
Above all, there’s a maddening absurdity to being a rational, secular Palestinian in a world that insists on turning you into a symbol — flattened, simplified, branded.
And the call’s not just coming from outside the house.
The first home I remember is an apartment on Baghdad Street in Kuwait City. We lived on the top floor, two floors up from the apartment of the PLO/Fatah representative to the Gulf states. I have no recollection of the man (save his name, Salim Za’anoon). He is not really part of my story except that his role in the PLO meant that our apartment building had a rickety nicotine-stained RV at the entrance to our building as a shelter for a rotating cast of young Fatah security men who sat, wreathed in a dense and ever-present miasma of cigarette smoke, drinking syrupy-sweet sage tea, and nodding to mesmerizing ballads of Palestine that sang of love, of dispossession, of homesickness, and of a painful and enduring sense of loss.
Their music was all lament and minor-key yearning — odes to lost keys, uprooted trees, ghost houses on hillsides no one had seen in decades. They smoked, drank tea, and regaled the children of the building with stories delivered with the weighted cadence of Scripture. Young men who had been taught that the best use of their lives was to end them in the service of a story. A cause. A flag.
They terrified me.
Not just because I feared death, which I absolutely did, but because I did not understand their narrative.
I could follow the beats of their stories and their logic, but always there was the ‘magical thinking’ step in the flow. The idea that sacrifice, or martyrdom, or the killing of others could somehow turn a life devoid of meaning into something honorable, useful, and more valuable than gold. A koan that confused me; Die to make your life make sense. You are the sacrifice. The point. The clean ending. The last paragraph. Become Capa’s Falling Soldier and transubstantiate from zero to hero, from lamb to lion.
Narrative coherence is, more often than not, a trap. Chaos, attenuated by the ablation of Nuance, that mortal enemy of every good piece of propaganda.
Those early years cursed me with what I can only describe as an allergic reaction to narrative clarity. I am someone who mistrusts tidy explanations. I flinch at the painting of suffering as noble, or victory as righteousness.
I understand in my bones how stories become cages.
I know all too well how Meaning can be the cosplay get-up of blood-thirsty lunatics. Because once you buy into the story — any story — you buy into its casualties. You kill the other and find yourself still shackled to the consequences. This is the handcuff logic of history. You swing the axe, but the chain doesn’t shatter — it coils tighter — Death Valley, measureless to man, beckons.
I grew up steeped in stories that didn’t always make sense, that often asked for belief instead of offering clarity, that turned pain into performance and grief into currency. I have come to stop trusting stories altogether. Or rather, I distrust those tales that tidy up too neatly.
I’ve come to think of exile not just as a loss of place, but as a war over meaning. I have always been (now unfashionably) drawn to David Foster Wallace. Not just for his tangled syntax or linguistic pyrotechnics, but for his obsession with how narratives disguise themselves as truths.
For an exile, this isn’t philosophy; it’s survival. When every story carries an asterisk, when every narrative aims to gaslight you, vigilance becomes breath itself as you try to resist the ego’s endless urge to center itself in every story.
Story is a double-edged sword; as likely to injure the swordsman as it is their foe.
I learned that lesson listening to those impossibly serious men talk about delivering liberation with Kalashnikovs and cassette tapes.
I remember the dissonance. The sense that something in their stories felt off. Imaginary. False. That the Palestine they described was less of a place than it was a mood. A vibe. A perfume. Something made fonder in its absence.
Most of all, I remember thinking, quietly and with profound guilt and shame, that killing to stop killing made little sense to me. The illogic terrified me. I remember wondering what would happen if they actually won. Suppose they got it all back. Would the story end? Would the hunger stop? Would we all finally be happy and at home?
You know the answer. And so do I.
Because in the end, exile isn’t just about connection to the land. It’s about narrative. About identity. You’re not just kept from a place. You’re kept from a version of yourself that only exists in that place. And which, if you ever got there, might not exist at all.
I wish I could tell you there was some clarifying encounter, some speech or moment that made it all legible. Some Pauline moment on the road to Damascus. But that would be the memoirist’s lie — manufacturing post-facto arcs across the messy sprawl of an ordinary life, finding patterns and assigning meaning to what is mostly beautiful, ordinary noise.
My life is far quieter, far more mundane, and far, far messier. I have accumulated contradictions like books I never shelved — stacked in teetering piles, mislabeled, misremembered. Some I understood. Some I ignored. Most, I polished into insight and passed off as wisdom, when really, they were just armor. Pretended enlightenment.
And in my darker moments, that’s all I think I’ve got.
Exile is not just distance from land.
It’s the internal dissonance of carrying a dream you can never fully inhabit. But also, an inherited dream that you can’t let go of. Not without betraying the people who willed it to you. Or the people who died trying to make it real.
Even the stories we almost live — like the meals we almost get right — can leave an aftertaste that lingers for decades.
There’s a moment I return to often, not because of what happened, but because of what almost did.
I am walking past Harrods during winter break from school — blazer off, hands in my pockets, nursing the soft alienation of being a brown boy in England. Two hours later, a car bomb explodes in that exact spot. Six dead.
The randomness has stalked me ever since. If I’d lingered, taken a different turn, slept in — I’d have become part of a different story. One I didn’t write.
That’s the thing about exile: you’re always at risk of being cast in someone else’s narrative. Not the one you author, but the one imposed on you. Victim. Martyr. Symbol. Footnote. You’re never the protagonist. You’re just the plot device.
It’s not the bomb that haunts me — it’s that I almost became part of someone else’s story.
But fortuna favet fatuis. So, I walk on. An exile living in the parentheses of someone else’s script, haunted by stories that almost happened, and held hostage by the ones that did.
Just one, in a pile of memories that live, torn and folded and yellowed, in layers.
I flip, horrified, through a magazine tick-tock of the Sabra and Shatila massacres the image of fly on a curled dead hand forever seared into my brain.
I climb an impossibly long ladder to a plateau in Nablus, where my cousins and I fly homemade kites as IDF soldiers laugh and point their guns at us.
Driving through the desert in Kuwait, my father, snapping off the radio for the 100th time because the news is “too much” the tone of the announcer annoying him by slipping into a register that paints tragedy as routine.
It is this routinization of conflict, suffering, and death that is the real obscenity to me. More than anything else, it is this that has shaped an uncontrollable revulsion for the easy valorization of violence. Even righteous violence. Even dressed in the robes of defense or resistance.
Because when the atrocious becomes routine, you’re not fighting for dignity, you’re feeding on suffering. You’re harvesting the rich crop of pain and spinning the fibers of trauma into currency. This is where the machinery of despair becomes most terrifying: when repetition turns atrocity into ambience. And that ambience isn’t accidental — it’s engineered.
Exile isn’t just sustained by grief; it’s maintained by power. It is reinforced — actively, cynically — by those who benefit from its permanence. For them, exile is a system. It is managed, marketed, and efficiently administered.
Hamas exploits it. The PA monetizes it. The Israeli state bureaucratizes it. None of them is working to end exile. All of them are investing in its continuation because it grants them legitimacy, leverage, or both.
And so, exile stops being just a wound — it becomes an industry.
They are alchemists of despair, measuring out the precise volumes of tragedy and outrage needed to turn the news cycle.
Viewed through this lens, the attacks of October 7th, 2023, weren’t a strategic failure. They were a massive and calculated success for the Hamas™ brand. Massacre as marketing.
And like all marketing, the aim isn’t accuracy — it’s impact. The point isn’t truth; it’s traction. Control the story, and you control the outrage.
But the head-bangingly frustrating reality of this is that the Hamas story collapses the second it’s held up to a humanist light.
That’s the part that still undoes me. That’s what keeps me up when the bombs fall, even oceans away. That’s what drives me to write these sentences — unread, maybe, and certainly inadequate — but the only offering I have.
There are children under that rubble. Their names are not hashtags. Their deaths are not symbols. And the people who kill them will tell you, without blinking, that it was necessary. That it was regrettable but justified. That they had no choice.
But. There. Is. Always. A. Choice.
That doesn’t mean it’s an easy choice.
That doesn’t mean it’s a fair or symmetrical choice.
But if we are honest, we know that “We had no choice” is rarely the truth and often instead just a story we tell to live with the monstrousness of what we’ve already chosen to do.
It is complicated, yes, but complexity is not exoneration. It’s an indictment.
I have never met a Palestinian who didn’t carry grief like a spine. For some, it’s a second spine, but for many, it’s the only scaffold they’ve been able to build their lives on.
But I’ve also never met a Palestinian who didn’t dream, maybe quietly and oh-so-painfully, of something better than just survival.
The PA, toothless and complicit, has perfected the art of managed decline. The illusion of statehood as a substitute for the real thing. Their violence is quieter and more administrative. But no less corrosive. And beneath it all lies the same hunger: not for justice, but for power. For staying in the room.
A liberation movement that no longer seeks liberation. It’s not a paradox — it’s a farce.
And the Israeli political landscape has followed its own descent. What was once a country precariously navigating between its democratic aspirations and its colonial realities has now committed decisively to the latter. The rightward lurch has not been accidental; it has been engineered. Brick by brick. Bill by bill. The occupation, once whispered as a temporary compromise, now stands as a permanent fixture; normalized, bureaucratized, invisible to those privileged enough to look away.
Settlements don’t expand by accident. Dissent isn’t crushed incidentally. Courts don’t just tilt; they are tilted. Words like “defense,” “security,” and “necessity” are repeated like litanies, while the daily indignities inflicted on Palestinians are rendered into white noise. This is no longer a state trying to wrestle with its contradictions. It is a project of supremacy cloaked in the language of victimhood.
And just like Hamas. Just like the PA. The system isn’t interested in peace. It’s interested in permanence. In control. In narratives that sustain itself.
The calculus isn’t about justice — it’s about managing visibility. Pain is fine, so long as it doesn’t go viral. Violence is tolerated, as long as it’s quiet and procedural.
And yet, even now, even as Gazans burn again, I find myself asking questions I can’t easily answer. Like: what would I do if I had grown up in Sderot, not Kuwait City? If I had spent my childhood counting the seconds between sirens and impact? Would I still be capable of moral symmetry? Of empathy? Would I care about the dead in Gaza?
I want to say yes. Every bit of morality in me is pulling me to say, “Yes, of course.” But the truth is that I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I’m that good. That humane. That empathetic. And in a weird way, that’s comforting to me, because it reminds me that being properly human means you don’t get to be certain. You just get to try.
When I got to Berkeley, my world shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It was a subtle tweak, like a Dutch-angle camera setup or a table leg shifting half an inch beneath your coffee mug — enough to notice but not enough to annoy or disorient. It was strange in the best possible ways. People traded ideas like currency and elevated curiosity as the greatest of all the virtues. At eighteen, intellectually over-caffeinated and emotionally jetlagged, I was dropped into a weird and wonderful subset of people who wanted to talk about politics and philosophies and rhetoric and semiotics.
It was amazing.
I met an Israeli kid who was arrogant, funny, bombastic, self-assured, and obsessed with skate culture. We argued constantly. Frustrating at times, for sure, but it was also the kind of arguing that felt like building something. He talked about fear the way I talked about grief. And the more we talked, particularly about things unrelated to the conflict between our peoples, the more it became impossible to ignore the humanity and justifications behind the thinking of the other side.
I want peace, not because I believe in some kumbaya fairyland, but because I’m exhausted by the alternatives. That exhaustion isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. Earned.
The mirror we hold up to our oppressors also reflects us.
Once you look into that mirror and clearly see the ugliness of both faces, you can’t go back to certainty. You can’t look at a map or a bombing or a checkpoint and not also see those faces.
This isn’t the same thing as forgiveness.
This isn’t the same as agreeing, giving license, or accepting atrocities.
It’s more complicated, nuanced, and, yes, more frustrating.
It is disappointment layered over disbelief layered over some almost-gone echo of compassion.
It was also at Berkeley that I met Thich Nhat Hanh — not in person, but through the hours of raw documentary footage I logged as an assistant editor. He was quiet in a way that demanded full attention. “We co-create conflict,” he said. Over and over, like a mantra. Like a dare.
At first, I rolled my eyes. It felt like spiritual flattening. Like erasing history with incense. But I shifted. I am proof that watching 200 hours of Buddhist lectures and taking second-by-second notes on them will change you.
I started to understand that co-creation wasn’t another term for moral equivalence — that lazy, dishonest calculus that pretends a Predator drone and a homemade rocket occupy the same ethical space. Moral equivalence is a way to stop thinking. Co-creation, I realized, is more dangerous because it demands you think harder.
It suggests that even in a relationship of profound asymmetry — that of the occupier and the occupied, the powerful and the subjugated — both sides become locked in a toxic feedback loop.
One side holds the vast majority of the power; they build the walls, man the checkpoints, and deploy the jets. Their culpability is structural, active, and immense. But the other side, in reacting to that power — with righteous anger, with narratives of martyrdom, with their own acts of horrific violence — also contributes to the machinery of the conflict.
It doesn’t balance the scales of justice, not in the slightest.
But it does mean both are chained to the consequences of the dynamic they perpetuate.
It asks something impossible of you: to see your own side’s contribution to the toxicity, to carry weight you didn’t choose but can’t deny. It’s not fair. But it is true.
When Rabin was assassinated, I wept. Not because he was a hero — we hated the guy. But he was an old warrior who sat with another old warrior and cracked open a window. A right-wing lunatic slammed it shut. To me, Rabin’s death was a message: Hope is provisional. Dream too loudly, and someone will end you.
And so, I got quieter. I stopped writing. Stopped debating. Silence felt safer. Cynicism became the armor I didn’t know I was putting on. The world moved on. Oslo faded.
Intifadas flared and subsided. And my Palestinian-ness became a private ache, a song I hummed under my breath but didn’t perform.
Then came October 7th and everything after.
And here I am again. Writing. Not because I think it will help. But because I can’t not. Because the silence has become unbearable. Because exile’s hunger still demands feeding. And because some dreams are worth chewing even if they hurt going down.
The thing about writing this — now, after all these words — is that I don’t know how to end it. Not emotionally. Not structurally. I keep circling back to that image from Greed: two men in the desert, handcuffed together, one dead, one alive, both doomed. Melodramatic but maddeningly exact.
I’ve seen both sides clawing at the sand, dragging each other’s corpses, and calling it progress. To be clear, one side has advanced jets and billion-dollar defense systems; the other has jerry-rigged rockets and tunnels. But asymmetry aside, the chain that binds is real. Every politician speaks as if the chain doesn’t exist. As if victory were just one more strike, one more wall, one more rocket, one more child buried.
We’re all standing in the same dust. Chained to each other. Not metaphorically. Mechanically.
The other side — Israelis — carry their own exile. Different shape, different timeline, same structure. Fear as inheritance. Trauma is baked into language. Kids are taught to expect rockets, sirens, and bunkers. Grandparents who survived genocide and told stories that became state policy. It doesn’t justify what they’ve done. But it does explain it. And yes, explaining isn’t excusing, but it’s just the only way I know to keep the chain from strangling both of us.
Because that’s the choice.
Not justice or injustice.
Not peace or war.
But chain or knife.
Stay bound together and learn to both live or kill the other and die with them, too.
The truth is, I don’t want to be handcuffed to Hamas, or the PA, or the Israeli government. I don’t want their blood-drenched fantasies anywhere near my child.
But I don’t get to write this story alone.
And neither do they.
No one does.
This is why the only path forward, the only one that doesn’t end in more bodies and press conferences pretending to be mourning, is recognition. Not some soft-focus reconciliation fantasy.
Just the brutal, unvarnished fact that neither side is leaving.
Not love. Not even forgiveness. Just a cold, sober, mutual admission: we are here.
We are not going away.
There are handcuffs.
We cannot break them.
This is the least romantic kind of peace imaginable. There’s no hugging at the end. No flags waved. No Nobel Prizes.
Just tired, blood-soaked, and bone-weary adults in a room admitting to each other that the alternative is untenable. That the blood we spill now is borrowed from our children.
Maybe, if we’re lucky or just tired enough, that kind of honesty can birth a different kind of future. One that doesn’t have to be fair. Or symmetrical. Or even redemptive.
Just one that doesn’t require Israeli and Palestinian parents to bury their children in freshly dug earth, day after day.
I will make mujadarah again.
The lentils might break down. The rice might go soggy. But I’ll stand at the stove anyway, adjusting the heat, adding “shwayet irfeh,” and trusting my hands to remember what my mind cannot.
Not because I believe this act will rebuild a home; I have spent decades learning that exile is a wound that never fully closes. But because the act of creation itself is a form of hope. Because it insists on a future. Because it builds a momentary tabernacle against despair.
Because sometimes the dream of what could be is more nourishing than the memory of what was.
This is the discipline I have learned: that hope is not a feeling to be found, but a choice to be made, a dream to be fed. This is how exiles must live, tending to a fragile possibility in the dark.
And so when the steam rises, fragrant with cinnamon and cumin, and that image of the two men in the desert returns unbidden, I will have my answer.
The handcuffs are real.
But so is the dream.
And I am the living man, stirring not because I am pretending the chains aren’t there, but because this is how we prove we are more than the chains, that there is power in dreams of hope.
Some months ago, while I was wrestling with my own draft, I asked my incredibly talented and generous friend Libby Lenkinski to read it. She, in return, asked me to read an essay she was working on.
I was floored. Her piece, “Rose Jam,” is tender, unflinching, and grounded in a clear, moral call: reparations for Gazan families and the hard truth that healing needs more than ceasefires — it needs repair.
I’m grateful to have read it early, and humbled to point you to it now. start with libby’s essay; Let it sit with you. It’s the kind of clarity we all need more of.
