The Skin and Its Girl

There is a part of this story that will always be, mostly, a love poem. But it's the kind sung in a key you and I know so well: adoration galvanized by futility. The sweet apricot that is impossible to catch, the beloved with a one-way flight offshore-each could be a stanza in our own personal ghazal.

But what was death to me, when it was my first act in life? Death looked like the house of the body opening, returning to a wider place: that place of confusion and strange beauty.

Do you know what it's like to be bewitched? Your mind bends. Your entire life shrinks to the size of a small room. The imagination is a fever. You can't stand it. Nobody can stand it-that's the point of falling in love.

But love is nothing if not a catastrophe, one that makes me second-guess gravity, history, the limits of my own person. Love is, might be, feels like, a kind of fairy tale too-one that can only begin once the story we thought we knew blows apart.

All the old stories talk about the Road of No Return, the Road of Good Fortune, the Road of this and that, but I'm seeing that a woman is not fully in possession of herself until there is no road at all, and she must make her own way.

I reach the center of the problem: in all the crossroads real and imaginary, there is no Road of Return. It is possible to come back to a place, but there’s no undoing the transformation that happens once the heart has chosen to leave.

But I tell you, I recognize myself by death's mark, and for a time I imagined almost every day that it were different, that I could be anything other than impossibly blue.

Tomorrow I'm to leave your grave for good. Someone loves me and wants a life with me elsewhere, beyond other borders, where other languages are spoken. To my shock I'd said yes, lit by the hot-faced enthusiasm always lurking at the bottom of a second boulevardier; and when I woke up the next morning, I'd realized I'd mean it.

It bears repeating here that the West Bank is one of the oldest places in civilization. In Nablus, the bible isn't the Bible, it's a community of anthology by a bunch of local writers.

Our heroine learned the freckle on the side of a toe and the curve of a hip in her hand; she learned how soft a woman's lip felt, and how many shades of warmth and coolness she could find when she ran her hands through another woman's unbound hair. And for as long as she lived, she would never forget how it felt to hide—and to caress that fine, thrilling line between the fear of being discovered and the ecstasy of discovering.

I think forgetting has more in common with cruelty than with forgiveness.

I had the first inkling that some kinds of splendor were invisible to others. Were not wrong. And the solitude of this knowledge was wide and comfortable, a sort of imaginary palace.