… she went on, there is no word for fu'aad either. The dictionary has it as "heart." But fu'aad is not heart, but an inbetween space, the correspondence or communication between the heart, the spirit, and the mind, and therefore it relates not to human anatomy but rather to metaphysics.

….as I studied the photos of my friend and read what others were saying about him, I felt I was observing a parallel self, the self I was not, the self I had failed to be. I spent those days with the sense of being twinned, taken out of my life. I often was not the one on the bus to work, but an external being, observing the counterfeit version of

"God veil our faults,' as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, 'God erase our faults.' Now that would've been ambitious. But ‘veiľ is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and

I worried about not having strong opinions. The truth was, I did not care much for opinions. I wanted instead to be in the silent activity of a good book, to observe and feel.

But even back then I sensed that Mustafa and I read differently. He entered books with pointed implements. It mattered to him whether he agreed with the author or if he believed them to be of sound character. He consulted their politics, their opinions on various topics, and experienced a passionate keenness, which showed itself in his eyes every

"I have resigned myself to the fact that I live in a world of unreasonable men and the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is, best we can, avoid their schemes."

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream.