After I hung up with Mama, I made two other phone calls: my editor, to cancel my morning meeting, and Nadia, to tell her that I would not be coming over for dinner that evening.

“Why not, Aliyah?” she whined, and I hated lying about feeling ill, especially when she’d been confined to her bed for months since her car accident. She’d become grumpy, and I felt guilty for forgetting to spend time with her. I hung up quickly and, unsure of what else to do, I pulled out my box of photos from that summer.

“He’s marrying Fattin, the daughter of your father’s neighbor from Ramallah,” Mama had said, her words bringing back the image of Fattin’s chubby cheeks and hooded eyes to my mind. I imagined her face and then Kareem’s, with his dark eyes and thick black lashes about which medieval poets on horseback would have composed ghazals had they adorned the face of a woman.

Kareem’s eyes gazed back at me now from the gloss of one photograph in particular. I was in that photo too, wearing the red, embroidered scarf that he bought for me that afternoon in the Old City. We stood in front of Damascus Gate, staring at the camera, though perhaps I should have been looking intently at the person holding it. Kareem’s eyes in the photo are dark pools of molasses. Mine are closed.

I still had the scarf, folded neatly on the top shelf of my closet, where I kept a lot of things I didn’t want to look at, but didn’t want to throw away. Some things I kept closer to me; the golden crucifix pendant he’d given me when we first started “talking”—as the Palestinians called it, because it was never “dating”—still hung around my neck. I could never throw that away. I had been taught how to respect religious objects: to kiss the statue of Mary if it ever fell off the shelf to the ground, to press the crucifix or the image of Jesus to my lips when I needed help.

He had given me the scarf with a flourish that day in front of Damascus Gate. “To my American sweetheart,” he’d said, and draped it around my shoulders.

I’d flinched, and reminded him that I was an Arab-American. There was a hyphen there, connecting the two things that created me: the one that drew me to him and the other that kept me at a distance.

“Yes …” And he smiled to pose for the picture. The camera was raised, and even though I knew the flash was coming, I’d blinked.

I pulled myself off the bed, still wearing my pantsuit. Shoeless, I went back to the closet and pulled down my journals this time. I had spent an entire year writing endlessly about Kareem, filling pages madly, obsessively, even in the middle of the night, hands trembling, fingers itching, reaching for the notebook and the desk lamp. The words inked onto the ruled pages, stacked tightly like bricks, had formed a defensive barricade against invading thoughts of him. I had not written about him for months, but now I wanted to read.