I asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug besides heroin. Crystal methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. 'Come on, you know . . . you're just high as fuck.' Then in a dramatic whisper: 'Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind.

No one had told me that you can wake up, years passed, and not understand the person you are, the things you did the night before, the things you said, the things left undone, that it can feel like a nightmare, a wildly seductive, spinning nightmare.

I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,' my father continued. 'We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.

I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it.

I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.

My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.