If I tell you to imagine a doctor, you will directly picture a man, whereas if I tell you to think of a nurse, your mind will immediately perceive a woman.

In fact, mothering, teaching, and nursing are just a few examples of care work that societies cannot persist without. However, just like most kinds of care work, they are gendered and feminized and thus highly undervalued and underappreciated.

I buy flowers every Saturday and bake a few cakes; I even adopted a cat. Something is still missing. A carpet, maybe? Maybe, if it were the flying type that can take me back to Makhoul Street. But what if it were? What if I went back?

I love it when someone tells me “I’ll call you back as soon as possible,” and the hotline goes dead. I chew on it because it gets lonelier each time. As if the phone call never existed or the person on the other line was just an echo of mine but in a different voice.

When your world keeps getting harder and harder, where do you run to? When the future looks uncertain, is it still worth anticipating? When you live in an era where your children have no chance, what do you do?

Dear Diary,
The policemen finally gave you back to me. I was worried they were going to keep you as proof that I was no good. It took them a while to find names and numbers to call since I was adopted, but eventually, they got a hold of Sarah’s mobile number. The man on the desk has been on the phone nonstop, but I don’t think anyone has answered him so far.

“That’s always how it is in our culture, sons are just treated differently, it’s nothing really,” my mom would tell me, without a care in the world.

She dreams so big and high she built our house five times in her mind and made it house sixty thousand lives through fiction.

Arab is not just an ethnicity. It is a way of being situated in the world and a lens to be seen with. Being Arab, I feel a lack of sovereignty over my life. As an adult, I am, by the virtue of reason, able and supposed to have an independent character. But this is not the case.

We’d sit together for hours but we wouldn’t talk and wouldn’t look at each other and probably wouldn’t breathe and it would sickeningly feel like forever but we’d still be strangers sometimes even after we’d go back to bed until something suddenly clicked and things would fit back where they belonged.