I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

Give sustenance, Allah.Give sustenance to me.

Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren’t sad?Because it was nobody’s business if I was.