“But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.”

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

I’ve read that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

I’ve read that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.