“To know a place fully means both to understand it in an abstract way and to know it as one person knows another. At a high theoretical level, places are points in a spatial system. At the opposite extreme, they are strong visceral feelings. Places are seldom known at either extreme: the one is too remote from sensory experience to be real, and the other presupposes rootedness in a locality and an emotional commitment to it that are increasingly rare.”

Something big happens. Something bigger than you. My mother marches at a student protest in 1984, wearing suede boots, the sun rising over the mountain. Or, seventy years earlier, Kafka wakes up and learns that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Sunlight moves through the water glass on the nightstand. God comes down to Moses and tells him to refuse to golden calf, to take his children out of Egypt. My great-great-grand-father leaves his tribe on the Iranian border and settles in Afghanistan and says the Shahada. A whistleblower sits in a courtroom, his gaze turned towards a blue book that contains the sentence that will define his fate. Trials are held. The world spins. We send rockets into space, robots that take pictures of planets we have never been to. We write down the law, we amend it, and we define who is good, who bad. Documents are classified, hidden for years. Exile. War. Terrorism. A girl brushes her hair and plants a bomb in a café in Algeria. I felt no regrets. I did it for my people, she will say from her prison cell. Apokalypsis, which means revelation: the bride removing the veil, turning her face in the direction of the grainy wind. Sand fluttering in her eyes. You watch the news; everything you feared is true: They hate us. You belong, you understand, to the others. You think of Celan’s “Todesfuge,” the image of graves in the sky. You think of Palestine. And then, as always, there is loneliness. A loneliness as old as your childhood.

A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her—until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.