my favorite lines from kartography by kamila shamsie

“but distance is not about miles and kilometers, it is about fear.”

“karim has it mainly you’re around. it’s a moonsmile. no light of its own unless there’s a sun for it to reflect off.”

“after all it was just the ends of my sentences i was losing, it was just the antidote to my loneliness that i had lost.”

“ra. no one had called me that in seven years. when i thought of her, of ra, she was a fourteen year old who knew nothing about the empty spaces that can press against a person in the most crowded of rooms.”

“i do not know this man, i thought. i do not know him, but i cannot bear anything less than intimacy that allows me to discern at ten paces whether the sheen on his skin is sweat or tears.”

“i knew that one day, not today perhaps not even next year, but one day people more familiar to me than the smell of sea air would become strangers and i would become a stranger to them.”

“those of us who live here don’t have the luxury of being compassionate from a distance. we go on with our lives because we like the facade of maintaining a kind of sanity. when we laugh, that’s defiance.”

“the comfort of collective guilt.”

“it was as though our instincts to turn to each other, to want each other, remained as strong as ever, but when instinct stopped and thought took over we pulled away, each time with a little more disgust than the time before.”

“there’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free of because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.”

“what an odd and misleading thing familiarity is; so ready to disguise itself as intimacy.”

“is that why i make you so angry, karim? because i fail to live up to the person you thought i’d turn out to be?”

“come home, stranger.”