To have a friend here, in this waiting place, was a miracle, an event so unlikely (I now understood) that it causes pain, a brief distortion, and panic that it might not have happened, though you didn’t know a moment ago that it would.

Barthes says that waiting robs you of your sense of proportion. It plays out in scenes, in outbursts and calm, like waiting in a café for a lover to arrive. It is the ultimate indignity, to be made to wait; and power is to impose it.

There are private things only the pulse can verify: love, pain, illness.

Sometimes in life, impossible things happen, and they are nonetheless true.

“I’m standing on a thin border between the past and future, waiting for madness to come.”

This is the life of a refugee. Madness in increments, by an ever-shifting endpoint.

I’m not a patient human, but I’ve been a terrified foreigner.

Real gratitude doesn’t present itself loudly, in lofty gestures.

In asylum interviews, no one believes an instant conversion. And yet, the moment the refugee is welcomed in, he is expected to make just such a quick transformation, to shed his past, to walk through the gates clean, unencumbered by a past self. Can a person’s heart and mind change in an instant? Can the habits of his hands, the words on his tongue?

Transformation is decided in an instant, and it takes years.

No one wants to transform. And yet no one can avoid it—we alter with every breath. Other people transform us with their love, their kindness, and also with their indifference. We change by being seen or unseen. We badly want to show ourselves to each other.

We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.