RIP Sigmund Freud, you would’ve loved psychoanalyzing Charles Bukowski.

 My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives 
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance: 
it is not the earth I will miss, 
it is you I will miss.

”She didn’t have that delicate thing called charm. I’m the only one who finds her charming. Only I, her author, love her. I suffer for her. And I’m the only one who can say this: ‘what do you ask of me weeping that I wouldn’t give you singing?’”

What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat into the road a blood phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

”There is a darkness in me, now. A monster awakened from a very long sleep. I suppose it was always there, but now it's running loose. I get angry at things, insignificant things. I snap at Tidir for being kind to me. I scold my children for being children. I choose my words carefully like I would a weapon. I hurt the people I love. I watch it all happen like I would a movie. I do not trust the man in the mirror anymore.”

This little book definitely hit me harder because my parents are immigrants from Iran just like Idir and Tidir, and my brother and I could easily step into the shoes of Ramzi and Salma. News outlets paint immigrants as almost a blight on their recipient societies, when, ironically, it is often the host countries themselves that foster and inflict the barbarism they so readily expect from immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers onto their own inhabitants. Obtaining citizenship is not easy, and the process is infected with much hypocrisy. Fleeing pain in one’s native land only to confront another version of it; people driven to pick their poison, choking it down, knowing the damage it’ll do, bearing the brunt of it to shield their children who, if everything goes right, will never know its taste from neither here nor there.

All that aside, I loved the writing style; the terrorist was pretty funny. I do wish the ending was a bit longer, but the pacing was otherwise fantastic.