It shocked me how many checkpoints there were just to go from one village to the next. It seemed Palestinians could not drive more than five minutes without having to wait at yet another. We had to go through two checkpoints on the way to the shop. The first we crossed by car. Typically the wait was about half an hour, but it could be as little as ten minutes or as much as two hours, depending on the mood of the soldiers manning it. Then we would park the car in a lot by the second checkpoint, which could only be crossed on foot. Sometimes we could just drive through the second checkpoint, but usually we had to gather our bags from the car and walk the rest of the way—about half a mile, no matter the weather. Bilal did not want the soldiers to know we were together, and I’d have to wait in line to cross far ahead of him. “Notice, only the elderly couples cross together,” Bilal said. I discovered the reason on my own. A soldier groped a teenage girl in line with her father, and when he protested, they threw him to the ground and made them both sit on the side of the road for hours. Bilal knew the father and offered to refrigerate their grocery bags until they were released, but soldiers shoved Bilal to move along.

Before going to the bakery and pastry shop, Bilal and I made daily excursions through the countryside early in the morning. It was exhausting at first, but my time with Bilal was so affirming, I didn’t want to miss a moment of it. I set an alarm for 5 a.m., rising daily before the first adan. He would already be making coffee. Then he and Hajjeh Um Mhammad would perform the fajr salat, feed the chickens, and take a light breakfast with the rising sun.

I wasn’t particularly fond of the rugged outdoors, but I began to see those rocky hills differently through the sheer force of Bilal’s passion for everything they held. Most striking was the silence. Absent was the persistent cacophony of traffic, street vendors, pedestrians, construction, and the buzz of streetlights that filled every space of our tight living quarters both in Kuwait and in Amman. Instead, I awoke to the songs of birds and wind chimes, and I was lulled at night by the orchestras of crickets and the calls of jackals and wolves.

It was disorienting in the beginning, because I didn’t know how to be in such openness. I found myself breathing deeply and deliberately in the mornings, inhaling the immensity of that silence. It made me realize how limited my world had been that I could not imagine the need to pack more than house slippers in addition to multiple pairs of heels, even though I knew I would be here at least a couple of months for the divorce proceedings.