My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.

I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.

Don't fall in love or let anyone's life become more important than your own.

I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know.

We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.

I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.

Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth.

My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.

I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.

Nightmares always recur, but never our most beautiful dreams.

I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.

We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That's why I named you Ahlam.

When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain.

With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.

I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond.

It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.

I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.

I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt.

I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.

I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.

It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.

I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it.

I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.

One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.

I lit a cigarette. 'Go ahead, take a smoke,' my father said. 'It won't kill you. Only sadness will.

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.

Find someone who loves you more than you love them.

Her father kneels and unclasps the urn. Above the waves she falls graceful as snow, my sister, my Sonora.

New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.

My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.

Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.'Look at his view,' my mother says.

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.

This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.

You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,' my father continued. 'We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.

I don't think I'm from this galaxy at all. I believe I came from the Andromeda galaxy, not so far, but far enough. Maybe that's why I'm an outcast.' He drew the spiral of Andromeda close to the Milky Way, almost touching. Then he pointed to Andromeda in the night sky above us.'Maybe that's where I'm from too,' my father said. We could still see the stars.

There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.

We would survive even ourselves, as long as we were together.

Like hunting for a dead beloved's face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before.

I asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug besides heroin. Crystal methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. 'Come on, you know . . . you're just high as fuck.' Then in a dramatic whisper: 'Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind.

Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater.

I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.

My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.

I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.

You know the most common phrase in the movies is 'let's get out of here?