"Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting," she concludes. "I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you're here, you're ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging."
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
