I said to you,"Hold my hand.Nothing bad will happen."These are only words.A father's tricks,It slays your father,your faith in him.Because all I can think tonight ishow deep the sea,and how vast, how indifferent.How powerless I am to protect you from it.All I can do is pray.

‎I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir

war. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing.

You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole.You have learneddark blood is better newsthan bright.

I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

But that life, that time,seems like a dream now,even to me,like some long-dissolved rumor.First came the protests.Then the siege.The skies spitting bombs.Starvation.Burials.These are the things you know.

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015.In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.