The house is decorated in high-class American style, no knickknacks, no faded pictures, and no Muhammad mosaics. Neat encyclopedia, nineteen matching volumes. High-class halogen bulbs. Chairs that make you cross your legs. Lush carpeting, even in the bathroom. No cold feet or need for clap clap clap slippers to wear in the house. The temperature is regulated between seventy-three and seventy-eight degrees, even though we are in Arizona and it is very expensive to do this. High-class American blah, no soul, no colors, only outside walls that wandered in and stayed. Show-off house with no heart or fancy bracelets.

Funny how this never bothered me before, how I almost didn’t notice it.

Maybe Hamdi is trying to fit in, have a house sturdy and plain like everyone’s moods. Maybe they both like this look. Maybe they see it best not to imagine as you gaze at the walls, that it’s best to sit in silence.

Everywhere I look is clean, neat, Navajo white. There are no photos and only one painting in the living room. It is a grayish, whitish abstract. I cannot imagine anything when I look at it. I might as well just stare at the wall.

In my house in Amman, which I always think of as “my mother’s house,” because it was so much in her style, every nook and cranny fillled with something: a plant, a book, a statue, a flower, and every wall was covered with religious plaques, calendars, photographs. Every gift and every souvenir ever received or bought was on display like a trophy. Always somewhere to look to take you somewhere else, to make you think. Either a memory resurrected or a new place to go or a joy to feel. Only way you could not think in our house would be if you closed your eyes and imagined nothing, which is impossible. No spare wall space. No place for thoughts to stop.

Nothing like this fancy, scrubbed-clean, no-imagination house that makes me deadly tired like a full day just past and I haven’t gotten out of bed yet.

Four days back. Maybe it is not so exciting because it seems very permanent. This is now my home.

Hamdi took Soraya on an errand. (I am sure it is to Dairy Queen. He is supposed to be on a diet, but I have caught him sneaking Blizzards twice already.) Fay is at the University. I am alone with the white walls that never bothered me before, and longing, so much longing for a home that doesn’t exist anymore, and I close my eyes again and go back, just like that, eight thousand miles in the blink of an eye. Hamdi would not approve. He is the opposite of my mother and does not believe in staying late in bed unless you are dying.

“How do you expect to make it in this country if you don’t work harder than everyone else?” he says.