Everywhere I turned in Amman there was a reminder of loss. My favorite Kuwaiti television series—of Um E’leiwi and Bu E’leiwi, Suad Abdullah and Hayat elFahd and Maryam Saleh—were now painful to watch. I missed Kuwait’s ocean, the warm blue immensity that accompanied us wherever we were, even when we camped in the desert during winter. The Arabian Gulf lapped at all my memories: its salty air brushing against our skin, threading our hair, and infusing our lungs when we sat at beachside cafés or evening concerts; the tide revealing and hiding tens of thousands of scampering crabs; the scorching sand blistering our feet; the boys we watched watching us on the beach, its warm water washing away our worries; ice cream from Ala’a Eddin in Salmiya, frozen booza dhahab cooling us in the heat. I was so far from those shores that held everything I knew in the world. I had not yet imagined a future for myself, but somehow I knew it had been derailed. I suppose I had always assumed that whatever dreams I thought to follow would unfold in the familiar landscape of Kuwait. Now the land had been pulled from under my feet and I wobbled in the unsteady terrain of refugees, struggling to carry on.

It wasn’t like that for Mama or even Sitti Wasfiyeh, who had sworn she would never recover from becoming a refugee again. It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replanted elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.