And I topple over, onto the ground and onto my head. He rushes over to where I’m sprawled, my leg bent backward behind my neck. Instead of lifting me up he simply readjusts my leg, then offers me his hand. “Do you know why you fell?” he asks.

“Why?”

“Because you were touching the flowers!”

A non sequitur, but I accept his logic as valid. In the video Laila laughs behind the camera. “Something to remember,” she says.

•

When I was eight years old, they sent me to French sleepaway camp in Quebec for a month. My mother flew with me to Montreal and together we took a train to Saint-Alexis-des-Monts. “I don’t need you to come along,” I said as we boarded a pre-dawn train. “I’ll be okay on my own.”

She would return to Montreal that evening and travel to Amman the following morning for the rest of summer. I spent that first day of French camp reveling in my newfound independence, thrilled to be around teenage counselors and away from my parents. In class that afternoon we were instructed to draw a stick figure and label its body parts in French. Eager to impress the others, I drew a man dancing barefoot in the rain with an upturned umbrella. When the teacher came by to inspect my work he frowned at the sight of my drawing. He then glued the pages of my notebook together, as if to cancel out the incident.

Soon it was dark. No one in my dorm spoke English. I lay in bed listening to the unfamiliar French around me, trying unsuccessfully to stifle tears. The older girls in the room attempted to comfort me—one even offered her teddy bear—but I wouldn’t stop crying. It wasn’t them that I wanted. I felt abandoned—a whole month without my mother. In the morning, I begged the camp’s dean to let me call her before she left for Jordan. They finally gave in, and when she answered I cried, “Mama! Don’t leave me! I need you!”

And so my mother stayed in Canada. I spent the weekdays in Saint-Alexis-des-Monts, and on the weekends I took a bus to Montreal. I’d sob when I had to leave her on Sunday afternoons. The routine persisted for the entire month of July, until finally, we went home.

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