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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Ronald McDonald Balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York City, New York (Photo by: Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. A Peer-Reviewed Portrait of Suffering

Daniel Engber | The Atlantic | October 6, 2021 | 7,200 words

The best science stories are human stories, ones that show the impact of lab experiments, clinical investigations, and complicated data on people’s lives. Daniel Engber’s poignant profile of the Sulzer family falls squarely in this camp. When three-year-old Liviana suffered a traumatic brain injury in the Sulzers’ backyard, her mother and father — a bioengineer who specializes in regenerative medicine and a professor of rehabilitative robotics, respectively — were forced to bring their work home. They mustered their expertise to help Livie, but quickly met the limits of the technology they’d spent their careers developing and championing. How, then, could they heal her, and themselves? The answers are surprising. I was moved by Engber’s portrayal of scientific minds challenged to reconsider the lens through which they analyze the world; of a family navigating protracted trauma; and of the love, patience, and curiosity that keep the Sulzers’ hope alive. —SD

2. The Great Beyond

Sara Reinis | Real Life | October 7, 2021 | 2,299 words

I’ve been contemplating how social media has changed the way we grieve for a while now, ever since my best friend died 10 years ago. I’d experienced mourning in a new, distributed way: collectively and on screen, as his friends across the U.S. and his relatives from Nairobi I’d never met all gathered on his Facebook profile over weeks, months, years. Some people left quick comments, as if they passed by a cemetery to leave flowers; others lingered, typing as if they were communicating with him in real time. How was social media changing the way we experience loss? For Sara Reinis, it’s also been a decade since a loved one — her brother — passed away. In her recent essay for Real Life, she stirs up many questions for me again, plus new ones. What does it mean when we interact with the Facebook and Instagram profiles of deceased loved ones and celebrities as pilgrimage sites — digital shrines and tombstones we (re)visit, deliberately or not, across an algorithm-powered internet? And what about someone like me, who has since deleted Facebook and Instagram? Am I missing out on novel, ever-evolving ways to mourn? (Should I be intermingling with the avatars of the dead?) After all, as Reinis writes, “the dead will outnumber the living” on Facebook by 2100. She asks thoughtful questions, and I’m now thinking about the idea she poses that the Western approach to grief — a mostly private and “ceremoniously finite” event like a funeral — may evolve into something very public, social, and continuous. And the biggest question she asks looms over me: Can we even trust tech giants with our digital remains? —CLR

3. My Father, The Hitman

James Dolan | D Magazine | October 11, 2021 | 5,021 words

Sometimes all it takes is a single sentence to draw you fully and completely into a story and James Dolan does just that with the opening to “My Father, the Hitman.” “My dad had gotten out of prison, and, for the first time in years, we were sitting down to dinner. It turned out to be the last time I ever saw him alive.” This fantastic portrait is filthy with detail, the kind that makes you want to slow down and savor every word. —KS

4. Tongue Stuck

Irina Dumitrescu | The Rumpus | October 12, 2021 | 2,662 words

Irina Dumitrescu considers the beauty of her Romanian heritage and her decision to teach the language to her son Maxi, so that he can more deeply understand and appreciate his extended family. “I wanted him to know his grandparents in Romanian. I wanted him to know how funny and smart they are, to sense that spirit that is so often lost in a second language.” This is more than just a beautiful essay on identity. Dumitrescu looks critically at her Romanian skills but her words become poetry to me as a reader — despite not knowing the language — when she uses them with such deep intimacy: “I spoke to him in the way that felt most natural, and that meant the language I’d heard when I was small. This was the language in which I was cuddled and pampered, caressed, and sometimes scolded. I suddenly understood how wonderful Romanian is for talking to children. How many darling diminutives I had ready for each part of his body. He had tiny fingers, degețele; a wee belly, burtic; a sweet little nose, năsuc; and dear little feet, picioruțe. Romanian has a treasure of endings to make each noun Lilliputian: -uțuri, -eluri, -ioruri. English seemed then a bulky, hulking way to speak, and for the first time I could not believe that there were people who used the same heavy word for the coarse fist of a grown man and the delicate hand of a newborn.” —KS

5. The Death of Ronald McDonald

Amelia Tait | Vice | October 4, 2021 | 1,600 words

Within the first 15 minutes of a family road trip, I would start the chant: “Can we stop at McDonald’s?” Every British motorway service station seemed to have one, and they were always adorned with Ronald McDonald — Ronald climbing frames, Ronald slides, or just plain old Ronald statues. So it was with great interest that I read Amelia Tait’s fun piece about the demise of this iconic clown in British advertising. (He clings on in the United States with a few in-person appearances according to his U.S.-based Instagram account.) Despite a last-ditch effort, with “a new look, swapping his jumpsuit for a red blazer and a bowtie” he quietly slipped out of the U.K. in 2014 and, as Tait finds out, everyone seems to be rather cagey as to why, cryptically claiming they “are not allowed to talk” as if Ronald is part of the underground clown mafia. Despite these obstacles, Tait jumps wholeheartedly into this mystery and discovers that Ronald’s decline is due to a combination of the ethics of advertising fast food to children, and the realization that a clown with a red wig is just plain creepy. I really enjoyed Tait’s enthusiasm and humor as she explores why Ronald McDonald, along with his sidekick the Hamburglar, are out of a job. —CW

Death of Writing, Writing of Death: A Reading List on Artificial Intelligence and Language

The other day, I saw a tweet of an obituary, seemingly written by a bot. The obituary’s odd but delightful phrases like “Brenda was an avid collector of dust,” “Brenda was a bird,” “she owed us so many poems,” and “send Brenda more life” were hilarious to some people — send me more life too, please! — while others couldn’t help but wonder: Is this really a bot?

You didn’t have to fall too far down a rabbit hole to learn that the obituary, in fact, was not written by a bot, but a human — writer and comedian Keaton Patti — as part of his book, I Forced a Bot to Write This Book. Some commenters, perhaps proud of their human-sniffing capabilities or just well-versed in real machine-written prose, were quick to point out that there was no way a bot could write this.

This had 20x the feel of a human trying to write a funny thing than a bot

Pretty sure a person wrote this without any technology more complicated than Microsoft word

not a bot! the punchlines are too consistent

For everyone afraid that AI is taking over, the bot said Brenda was a bird…

Try a language generator at Talk to Transformer, an AI demo site.

Even though the obituary was human-generated, it still reminded me of two editors’ picks we recently featured on Longreads — Jason Fagone’s feature “The Jessica Simulation” and Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts” — in which AI-powered prose is a significant (and spooky) part of these stories. Both pieces prominently feature GPT-3, a powerful language generator from research laboratory OpenAI that uses machine learning to create human-like text. In simple terms, you can feed GPT-3 a prompt, and in return, it predicts and attempts to complete what comes next. Its predecessor, GPT-2, was “eerily good” at best, specializing in mediocre poetry; GPT-3, which is 100 times larger and built with 175 billion machine learning parameters, comes closer to crossing the Uncanny Valley than anything, and raises unsettling questions about the role AI will play — or is already playing — in our lives. Read more…

The Cult That Promises to Cure Addiction

Benjamin Rasmussen for The Atavist Magazine

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 115, “The Love Bomb,” by Daniel Kolitz.

Daniel Kolitz| The Atavist | July 2021 | 10 minutes (2,100 words)

Prologue

On Super Bowl Sunday, three weeks into the 1980s, Dave Cherry had the house to himself. The 15-year-old was sprawled out on his parents’ gold bedspread watching the game, but on the list of things he cared about—Led Zeppelin, the possibility of alternate dimensions, acquiring and inhaling tremendous quantities of weed—football barely ranked. Inertia, a sense of having nothing better to do, was the only thing that kept him watching.

When the game ended, the network cut to Dan Rather, his posture as rigid as his hair. Rather introduced the subject of that week’s 60 Minutes episode: the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. “Few people outside of Texas had ever heard of PDAP,” Rather intoned, “until People magazine reported that Carrie Hamilton, the 15-year-old daughter of TV star Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton, had become a drug addict, and that her parents had sent Carrie to PDAP, where she kicked her habit.”

Cherry, who lived in the suburbs of St. Louis, wasn’t familiar with PDAP, nor with Carrie Hamilton’s recovery, despite Burnett and her family making the daytime talk-show rounds—Dinah Shore, Phil Donahue—to praise the program and its founder, a recovering addict and alcoholic named Bob Meehan. “Some see Mr. Meehan as a miracle worker,” Rather said, “bringing God and clean living back into young people’s lives. Others say he gets those youngsters dependent on him and PDAP in place of their former dependence on drugs and alcohol.”

Meehan appeared on screen, looking like someone’s hazy misconception of 1970s cool: wide white sideburns, bushy blond goatee. Fury seemed to flash behind his orange-tinted aviators. Cherry, the son of strict Southern Baptists, was suddenly interested. Meehan was precisely the kind of guy his parents would despise.

“Now, I’m saying, this program works for a group of people. If it doesn’t work for you, try another one!” Meehan told 60 Minutes. “We’re not controlling you in any way, shape, or form. You don’t like it, leave!”

Meehan called his method of treating substance abuse Enthusiastic Sobriety, or ES. It was a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for teenagers; it emphasized community and spirituality, but also insisted that participants needed to have fun. Cherry watched footage of cozy group confessionals and larger meetings that looked like pep rallies. Kids traded shoulder squeezes and looks of fervent understanding. A pretty woman, maybe 20 years old, cradled a younger boy’s head as another woman thanked him for filling a void in her life. “I love you,” she said, prompting claps and cheers from the people gathered around her.

A lonely kid, Cherry felt a stir of longing.

Meehan was so animated that, beside him, Rather looked like an expensive wax statue. When Rather questioned him about his $100,000 annual income, a combination of his PDAP salary and payments from a company that ran hospitals where PDAP referred teenagers for inpatient treatment, Meehan grinned. “If I wasn’t making money, you wouldn’t be here today, partner!” he said. Pressed for evidence of the high success rates PDAP touted in its advertisements, Meehan delivered a wandering monologue on the perils of methadone and the definition of success before telling Rather that if 60 Minutes or its host would like to give him $75,000 to conduct a study, he’d be happy to take it.

“Are you saying to me that you don’t have any data to back up your claim that you’re 75 to 80 percent successful?” Rather asked.

“The data we have is quite different from data anybody else has,” Meehan said.

“But when you boil it down, what you’ve got is a guess,” Rather pressed.

“Oh definitely,” Meehan said, inscrutable. “Definitely a guess.”

Rather presented dissenting opinions, from sources who described an environment that seemed designed to keep PDAP participants in thrall to Meehan. A mustached man in a tan leather jacket said that people were being “led to believe that we can’t make it without the program,” prompting Rather to remark, astonished, that this would make participation “never-ending.” Confronted with the notion that PDAP was manipulative and opportunistic, Meehan became even more energetic. “I’ve been a con all my life,” he told Rather. “Just, now I’m using it in a good way, see?”

The segment was in no uncertain terms a takedown. It aired on the highest-rated news program in the country, directly after the biggest event on TV. It should have been Bob Meehan’s undoing. But it wasn’t.

Over the next 40 years, Meehan proved to be a skilled shapeshifter and profiteer. Enthusiastic Sobriety, which as it turned out was even more destructive than 60 Minutes revealed, spread well beyond PDAP. It evolved, taking various names and forms; when one door closed, Meehan found another to open. Recovery programs that he ran or wielded influence over enrolled thousands of young people across the United States. Today, ES outfits run by members of Meehan’s inner circle still exist in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina.

ES also ensnared staff and some clients in what people who’ve abandoned it now call a cult. Meehan and his closest confidants—a group dubbed the Family—controlled every aspect of members’ lives. The story recounted here draws on interviews with 65 former clients, counselors, and loved ones of people involved with ES from its origins in the 1970s through to the present day. Their experiences echo those described in an active online community of former ES followers, who use Facebook and other social-media platforms to tell their stories. Some subjects spoke to The Atavist Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Flopped on his parents’ bed in 1980, Dave Cherry couldn’t have guessed the outsize role he’d one day play in ES, or the extent to which Meehan would come to dominate his life. Years would pass before the two even met. All Cherry knew on that Super Bowl Sunday was that he liked the guy. He thought Dan Rather had given Bob Meehan a raw deal.

***

Part One

Hard facts about Meehan’s life before PDAP are scarce, but he always told a compelling origin story—how he first shot heroin at 16; how the habit soon compelled him to pawn his parents’ furniture; how they committed him to a psychiatric ward; how he escaped and spent the next ten years on and off the streets, using not only heroin but also codeine, quaaludes, cocaine, speed, and alcohol. During this period, according to several people who knew Meehan, he claimed to have robbed several pharmacies, killed several men, and played drums in several small-time jazz ensembles.

In Meehan’s telling, his luck changed in 1971. Released from a Kentucky prison cell, he wound up in Houston, digging ditches for Rice University. At 27, he was mostly toothless—he wore dentures—and bald, save for a grimy curtain of hair running from the peak of his scalp down to his shoulders. A Fu Manchu mustache drooped past his chin. He’d mostly stopped using drugs but still wrestled with booze, and after another short stint in jail, this time for burglary and public drunkenness, he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church.

The gatherings were presided over by Father Charles Wyatt-Brown, a soft-spoken priest beloved by his community. Wyatt-Brown took a liking to Meehan, who was outspoken in meetings. The two began having lunch together. Wyatt-Brown soon hired Meehan as his church’s janitor.

Teens made regular use of the church in those days, playing Frisbee on the grounds and popping inside to use the bathroom. Some of them were drug users, and Wyatt-Brown encouraged Meehan to befriend them, hoping he might set them on a better path. In fact, Wyatt-Brown said, Meehan’s attention was better spent helping children than vacuuming hallways.

Meehan was singularly charismatic, a perpetual motion machine with a comic’s timing and a gift for connecting with kids. It helped that he chain-smoked, cursed incessantly, and had a vast supply of dirty jokes and prison yarns to keep them entertained. Soon, with Wyatt-Brown’s permission, six young people began meeting regularly with Meehan in the church’s basement. They played cards, complained about teachers, talked about crushes. Sometimes Meehan took to the piano, leading sing-alongs. Within six months, the group’s ranks had expanded to 40, and Meehan was formally promoted to the role of youth counselor. Another six months later, attendance had reached 250, and Wyatt-Brown established the Palmer Drug Abuse Program as a nonprofit, with a board of directors to facilitate the program’s growth. Meehan was made director.

Meehan didn’t have formal qualifications to run a drug-treatment program. What he had was life experience and an eye for demand. White middle-class Americans shaped by the promise and comforts of the postwar era were terrified that substance abuse would steal their children’s future. The war on drugs began in 1971, with Richard Nixon declaring illegal substances “public enemy number one.” Within a few years, the so-called parent movement, which preached zero tolerance of marijuana, narcotics, and alcohol, would spread across the country. But Meehan recognized that a top-down approach wasn’t likely to appeal to kids. What rebellious teenager does what their parents or president tells them to do?

Meehan started developing Enthusiastic Sobriety, which was both a theory and a practice. In order to entice teens, he believed, clean living needed to be just as fun—and just as reckless—as the alternative. If teens wanted to grow their hair long, smoke cigarettes, stay out all night, or even drop out of school, parents should let them—whatever kept them off drugs and alcohol was a good thing. Thus liberated, kids could enter the alternate social world of PDAP, which had its own dances, campouts, and house parties, all of them substance-free.

Spirituality was part of PDAP’s deal; much like AA, the program was rooted in the possibility of redemption. If that didn’t seem cool to teenagers, Meehan would be the first to tell them they were wrong. He believed that peer pressure was what drove young people to experiment with drugs and alcohol, and he aimed to use the same tactic to keep them sober. As soon as they walked in the door of a meeting, PDAP newcomers were smothered in hugs and people saying “I love you.” The tactic, called “love bombing,” is now widely recognized as a method for luring people into cults. One PDAP participant recalled thinking, “These guys are like the Hare Krishna or something. They’re going to try to make me sell flowers at the airport next week.”

In the program’s early days, Meehan met and married Joy DeFord, a diminutive, dark-haired divorcée who ran Palmer Memorial’s Alateen program, for teenagers who had alcoholics in their families. Joy came across as a polished Southern belle, a calm counterpoint to her manic husband, though she had quirks of her own, including an interest in hypnotism and homeopathy. The Meehans had a daughter and informally adopted a PDAP participant named Susan Lowry. Joy began running PDAP’s parent group, which held meetings each week. Hers was an essential role—PDAP’s smooth functioning depended on parents buying into the developing ES methodology.

PDAP could be a tough sell for parents. Beyond the smoking and the late nights, there was the fact that PDAP’s counselors looked like they could have been former drug dealers. Some of them were former drug dealers. One young man showed up for his first PDAP meeting, struck up a conversation with a counselor, and quickly realized that he’d “bought dope from the guy before.” When the adults balked about who was supervising their kids, Joy calmed them down. A common refrain was “Would you rather they were dead?”

PDAP was free, funded entirely by community donations. Participants had to commit to 30 days of sobriety, during which they would attend frequent meetings. They could keep coming to PDAP after that—in fact, they were encouraged to make the program the permanent anchor of their existence. Meehan, a fervent follower of AA, implemented a version of the 12 steps in PDAP. Participants made moral inventories and direct amends to those they’d hurt, and they admitted that substances rendered their lives unmanageable. Meehan put his own spin on other steps. His second one was “We have found it necessary to ‘stick with winners’ in order to grow.” To keep old friends around—especially if they used drugs or alcohol, but often even if they were sober—was to court relapse or worse. Once someone had PDAP, they didn’t need anyone else. In the words of one former participant, PDAP was “a whole group of people who were just like me.”

Read the full story at The Atavist

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, resources are available from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, including a 24/7 national helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Additional information on rehab abuse is available via Breaking Code Silence.

Zoom Towns — Where Tourists Never Leave

Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images

For many, the pandemic has meant barely shuffling from the kitchen to the sofa — but for some people, it’s been an opportunity to move their sofa to a completely different town. With many jobs shifting online, working from home via Zoom has meant no longer being tied to a particular place, so now, as Rachel Levin explains in her article for Outside, “you can work for Pinterest and ski powder.” This chance to “live the dream” in a mountain town has come with a downside — a culture clash. Those looking to move generally have cash — and are drawn to tourist towns occupied by locals making their money in hospitality. It’s a shift that has happened around the world, but in this interesting piece, Levin explores the situation in Lake Tahoe, which has seen a particularly big influx of new residents due to its proximity to the tech industry of San Francisco. So what happens when those who have money and those who don’t live side by side? Levin explores that question with a level head — looking at both sides of the picture.

Nina, a director at a Silicon Valley–based AI company who asked that only her first name be used, moved to the area in October, when she bought her first home just five minutes from Heavenly Ski Resort. She and her husband, newly married thirtysomethings, say they may not be experts at mountain life, but they’re eager to learn. (YouTube has been helpful, she says—it’s where they learned how to rake pine needles.) When she’s not working, Nina is snowboarding with women she met on local Facebook groups. She’s in heaven.

But like other newcomers, she and her husband have sensed a little resentment. She recalls the time a check-out woman at a grocery store in Stateline, Nevada, gave her and her husband one look and said, “Oh, you’re not going to last a winter.” She admits to skirting around the fact that they moved during the pandemic in casual conversations with locals. “I’ll say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not the bad tech people,’” she says. Another source told me, “There’s a lot of negative feelings about people like us.” Most Bay Area transplants I spoke with similarly requested anonymity, and many more declined to be interviewed. (So did many longtime locals. “Sorry, it’s a touchy subject,” one told me.) The newcomers just want to quietly slip in and fit in. 

Not everyone has that option, though. If you’re not white, like 82 percent of people in Truckee, you stand out, says Grace (not her real name), who is Korean-American and moved into her longtime second home last spring before the boom. Being Asian American “is like a big ‘Bay Area’ sign pointing at my head,” she says. She was disgusted by the “Kung flu” comments and other casually racist quips she saw on Facebook and deeply disturbed by the time she was fake sneezed on at the Safeway. She and her family moved back to San Francisco full-time by the fall: “I needed to be with my people,” she says.

Read the story

The State of Waiting

Photos and artwork throughout courtesy of Wafa Almaktari. Background image of Sana'a by Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images. Illustration by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

Caitlin Dwyer| Longreads | May 2021 | 22 minutes (6,168 words)

 

This story includes audio interludes. Listen to Wafa talk about her life, her relationship, and Yemeni culture through cherished objects.

Read an interview with Caitlin about her reporting and writing process for this story.

She is in a Toyota RAV4, somewhere in the mountains of south-central Yemen. It is hot, desert hot, and the AC doesn’t work. There is no road. The driver maneuvers the car through dry riverbeds, which show the cracks of prior floods. 

In the back seat, Wafa Almaktari tries not to throw up. She tries not to think about the men with guns who will stop them, demand money, and search their baggage over 50 times in the next 16 hours. If they don’t like her, or she cannot pay, she may disappear in these hills. She tries not to think about the fact that the driver, hired privately for $300, does not have a map.

How the hell does he know where he is, in the middle of the mountains? she wonders. But the alternative — a bus that blunders at even slower speeds, and attracts even more attention at armed checkpoints — was unthinkable. She has to get through the mountains as quickly as possible, because Moutaz is waiting for her.

It is June 2019. Moutaz Al-Qershi, her fiancé, lives in the northern Yemeni capital city of Sana’a. He was going to meet her when she landed in the port city of Aden. But she knows she can’t trust herself not to fling her arms around him and kiss him. In the U.S., where Wafa has lived for the last four years, public affection is normal for young couples, but in Yemen, unmarried couples can’t publicly embrace. She told him to wait at her family’s home.

Not that Wafa cares about what other people think. She’s waited too long. She has a lady in Sana’a baking her wedding cake (she found her on Facebook). There is a butter shortage, but she’s got connections. She’s even got a female DJ lined up.

“If Moutaz was not in Yemen, I would not go. I would not even visit,” she says. But he is here, and so she has returned — enduring the heat, the nausea, the armed checkpoints —  to a country in the midst of violent civil war. She does not know if she will be allowed to return to the U.S. after her wedding.

“Home is where Moutaz is,” she reminds herself. She twists the ring on her finger. She hopes — no, she knows — coming back was the right choice.

* * *

In 2021, the small Middle Eastern nation of Yemen ranks as the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Civil strife has mired the country in famine, cholera outbreaks, and violence. Since 2015, a complex set of combatants has battled for control: armed rebels in the north, known as the Houthis, who rule the capital; Saudi Arabian forces, who are determined to stop the Houthis; Al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula, who rose up briefly to fill a power vacuum; and southern separatists in the port city of Aden.

Wafa and Moutaz met before the war. Although a poor country, Yemen had been a democratic one. During the Arab Spring, protesters had demanded reforms, leading to a transitional government. In 2014, the transitional president was struggling to stabilize the country. Soon, international embassies would begin to close, and the militant group Ansar Allah, often referred to as the Houthis, would take the capital. Saudi Arabia would step in to oppose the Houthis, whom they saw as Iranian proxies. By 2015, ports would be blockaded, airports closed, and cities bombed.

But politics mattered very little to two young people who, despite societal restrictions and the potential scandal, were falling in love. 

Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers.

At the time, she was in high school and he studied electrical engineering at Sana’a University. Wafa had a huge, trusting smile, expressive eyes, and a laugh that rose up out of her chest. Moutaz was a serious, slender introvert, prone to long conversations on mathematical concepts. He was detail-oriented; she was all big ideas. She recalls how taken aback he was during their first interaction: “All the ideas that I tell him, and my hijab is not very on point. … I don’t have makeup on my face. So he’s like, you’re not normal.”

Despite the differences in their education, Moutaz didn’t intimidate her.

“It was this very weird chemistry that was between us,” she says.

They kept their relationship secret. Young Yemenis couldn’t date without being engaged or married, but the two of them did “all the crazy things in a very conservative society,” Wafa says. On one of their dates, Moutaz thought it would be romantic to ride Arabian stallions. The huge horses terrified Wafa. They were out in a sunlit field, beyond the city limits, far from prying eyes. She remembers watching him feed the animals, showing gentle care. “Although I was scared, around him I was very safe,” she recalls.

At the time, she had been suffering from tonsillitis and had been told not to eat any ice cream to avoid a possible surgery. On the way home, Moutaz stopped for a treat.

“I was like, oh, this is love. You’re giving me ice cream that I’m not supposed to eat, so I know you love me,” Wafa recalls with a smile.

That subtle spirit of rebellion would permeate their relationship for the next seven years. Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports. Surrounded by immigration restrictions and bound by national policies they cannot control, Wafa and Moutaz have refused to give up on each other. For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.

* * *

In the movies, love resolves itself quickly: Two chemicals combine, and either reject each other or dissolve into a single solution. It’s more difficult to convey the reality on screen. Love hits, and we wait, watching the colors creep up the pH strip, waiting for the hiss of reaction. Sometimes we know what the result will be, but still must wait for proof.

Most people wouldn’t watch a film of all those empty hours. We like the catharsis, the moment of triumph, the release of tension: a climactic kiss in the rain. But for many people whose loved ones live across borders, separated by visas, wars, or financial circumstances, there is no such easy resolution. Patience becomes the story.

Sometimes — as in Wafa’s case — waiting feels unendurable, and migrants buck against the helpless hours, months, and years. They might act to gain a sense of advocacy or autonomy, but rarely do the massive national circumstances that surround their situation shift.

Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers. They want to be together. They long for the normalcy of family dinners, daily commutes, and coffee dates. And so they wait.


 

* * *

Wafa arrived in the U.S. in 2015, joining her mother, Susan Kassim, and leaving her secret boyfriend behind. The two had been separated for a year, first by visa processing and then by war.

Kassim hoped her spirited, outgoing daughter would acclimate well. Three weeks after arriving in Oregon, Wafa started college, taking ESOL and math classes at community college. She then transferred to Portland State University to study business. 

But Kassim soon noticed that Wafa locked herself in her room for hours a day, talking on the phone to a “friend” back in Yemen. Like many moms of teens, she became suspicious. It wasn’t that a romantic connection back home was bad; in fact, if the phone kept Wafa from staying out late and going on unsupervised dates, Kassim was all for it. But she didn’t want secrets. 

So she watched. She saw that Wafa didn’t clean her room or make her face up for video dates. She noticed that they laughed a lot. She liked that Moutaz had a calming influence. Afraid he would get frustrated with Wafa’s sass, Kassim urged her to be more demure.

Wafa didn’t agree: “This is me. If I change then I’m not going to be me. It’s like fooling somebody.”

Satisfied, Kassim gave her blessing — but required that Wafa finish college before any marriage could take place.

So they waited. Donald Trump became president. Anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S.  rose. And in January 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which banned U.S. entry for several Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen. Before the ban, the wait time for a family visa to the U.S. could range from months to several years — and Moutaz hadn’t even proposed yet. After the ban, they were faced with an indefinite wait.

Wafa knew she had only one choice: “I’m going to fight.”

Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.

Her defiance shifted to her new country, which seemed to be rejecting her love and her future. She became more outspoken about immigrant rights. At her job, she began questioning a manager about microaggressions. She joined her school’s Muslim Student Association and developed her campus activism, starting her own student coalition in 2017.

A few years before, Saudi Arabia had begun an aerial bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm. Originally planned to last only a few weeks and drive the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, it instead became a prolonged aerial bombardment of the city. Sections of old Sana’a, built before the 11th century, were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died in those and subsequent airstrikes. The Houthis remained in control of the city.

Moutaz was working on an MBA when Operation Decisive Storm began. Bombs fell while he commuted to and from classes.

“At first it was intimidating and scary, but with time I got used to it so quick because the airstrikes would last for long hours and would occur daily,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “It took me two weeks to get used to the fear, the loud bombing, and accept the reality that I was living in.”

He adopted an attitude many Yemenis would come to embrace: If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.

“Although it was hard to be lonely during that time, when Wafaa left the country I felt much better. I worry about her more than myself,” he wrote.

They spoke every day on WhatsApp, sometimes trying seven or eight times before they could get a connection. When she heard about a new bombing, she would often call, panicked, to make sure he was all right. Video dates helped Moutaz get through the stress of school, separation, and airstrikes.

While Wafa grew more outspoken, Moutaz developed a stoic endurance. “I never saw our separation as a goodbye; rather I saw it as ‘see you soon in better circumstances,’” he explained.

In late 2017, Moutaz sent her a ring — ostensibly to ward off interested men from whom Wafa got a lot of attention. But along with the ring came 365 handwritten reasons why he loved her. A proposal came the following year.

“Hell yes, I want to marry you,” Wafa recalls thinking. They both knew what that meant: He was banned from coming to the U.S., so she would go to him, perhaps putting her green card in jeopardy. On the day that she submitted her last final exam to graduate, against the best advice of nearly everyone, she flew back to Yemen.


 

* * *

Americans often think of immigration policy as a grand national project. Politicians wax hopeful or fearmonger, drawing broad statements about the way we view ourselves as a nation, or the way we think of the Other. Such thematic strokes capture the immensity of the issue, but they fail in the details. 

Details like these: One day, Wafa walked into a grocery store in Beaverton, Oregon. There were tulips in pots, cheap sweatpants on racks, and sale bins of candy. Behind the standard smells of rotisserie chicken and plastic was another scent: Moutaz’s cologne. Someone in the store was wearing it. The smell overwhelmed her, and she collapsed on the floor in grief.

Starting in 2017, Donald Trump’s immigration policies explicitly used family separation as a means to discourage migration to the United States. This was a new twist: not just to separate families currently in violation of immigration law, but to use separation as a deterrent against future migration. 

Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports.

But for many years prior to Trump’s administration, U.S. immigration policies had been de facto separation policies. Undocumented parents could be deported, while their U.S.-born kids remained in the country. The parents often had little legal recourse. Long processing times, high fees, and complicated paperwork have meant that husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, kids and parents, are often separated for months or years while they wait. In Moutaz’s case, and the case of thousands of other applicants sidelined by the travel ban, the separation became indefinite.

“I talk to a lot of people every day [about] how hard it is,” Wafa says. “It’s just emotionally draining. It is expensive, it is risky.” 

Wafa has filed an I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, for Moutaz. It costs over $500. Add an international flight: When his case finally comes up for processing, he will need to fly to Malaysia, Algeria, or another transit country; the U.S. embassy in Yemen has been closed since 2015. Add $300 to hire a private driver for the 16-hour trip through mountains to Aden, which has the country’s only functioning airport.

“The Yemenis who have fled the country are very often from the middle and wealthy classes. For the most vulnerable, there are very few opportunities to leave the country,” write Solenn Al Majali via email. Based in Jordan, Al Majali studies Yemeni emigration at Aix-Marseille University and the French Institute of the Near East, and is a non-resident fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.

Wafa knows she is lucky. Her dad studied abroad in the 1980s, and her eldest brother was born in the U.S. He was able to sponsor some of his family members and help them escape the worst of the war. As a U.S. permanent resident, she has some leverage.

“If I didn’t have the resources or the money, I would not be able to apply for him. If he didn’t know how to speak English, he’s not going to come. If they see him at the embassy and he is not dressed well or he doesn’t speak well or he doesn’t have a career, you know, anything, they can just reject it,” Wafa says.

Since 1965, the U.S. has been relatively open to family immigration, mostly as a result of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. That legislation got rid of quota systems based on current U.S. census data. It opened the country up to immigrant families from more diverse countries. Thought about generously, the 1965 act was “driven by recognizing that family units are critically important for happiness, well-being, economic prosperity,” says Duncan Lawrence, the executive director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. (Full disclosure: Lawrence is a friend of mine.)

Support for families — from permission to find work to early access to ESOL programs — are the backbone of healthy immigration policy, according to Lawrence. But there’s one overwhelming factor in the health and well-being of families: keeping them together.

“If you had this magic wand of tools that you could use to positively impact families, I think that is probably one of the most powerful things you could do,” Lawrence says. Kids are especially vulnerable to separation from their parents, but all families suffer from the threat and reality of being apart.

No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love.

There is a kind of helplessness to this process that overwhelms Wafa. Despite her defiance of the travel ban, which was lifted by President Biden in January 2021, she remains at the mercy of international law. She cannot speed Moutaz’s visa interview or guarantee that he will not be rejected. Will U.S. Customs and Immigration Services see their relationship as one of convenience? How does she prove that she truly loves this man who she has seen only twice in five years?

There have been times when she felt like giving up and going back to Yemen. At least they could be together. In that sense, Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.

That kind of heartbreak leads a young woman to collapse in a grocery store. It sends her, desperate, back to a war zone.


 

* * *

Wafa arrived at her family home in Sana’a at night, after a harrowing 16-hour drive through the mountains. She still had the taste of vomit in her mouth. The smell of sweat clung to her. She dropped her bags off inside, briefly greeting her father before running out the back door.

Moutaz was waiting. Completely forgetting where she was, she burst out into the street and hugged and kissed him, not caring they were in public.

“I kept telling him, ‘This is a dream. This is not real,’” she says. “I think that night was the best night of my life.”

Planning a wedding in a war zone posed challenges. In 2019, four years of fighting had cost many Yemenis their businesses. Moutaz told Wafa that Houthis demanded a cut of private sales; the extortion, combined with the high price of goods, forced many people to move their businesses online. A 2015 Saudi-led blockade of the port of Hodeidah, where most Yemeni food had been imported, created massive shortages. Women especially had become Facebook entrepreneurs, making sweets and doing makeup from home. 

If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.

Wafa recalls the mixed emotions of that moment: “You feel guilty because you’re celebrating and you’re doing all these plans, and people are dying. People are dying out of hunger. People are dying in the airstrikes. Even the availability of things like who’s going to do the wedding cake. … I was telling him, should we downsize it? And he was like, ‘I loved you for five years. I’m not going to downsize my wedding and the celebration of love that we have.’”

Wafa also struggled to adjust to her Yemeni relatives. Her naturally ebullient personality, combined with years of living in American society, made her relatively intolerant of strict traditions. She invited Moutaz to tea at their family home, only to have her father kick him out. When an aunt complained that Wafa shouldn’t see her fiancé before the wedding, Wafa bristled: “I don’t really care what you think.”

Despite the tensions, a week later an imam proclaimed them married.

After the religious ceremony, she hugged Moutaz freely in front of others for the first time. It no longer felt wrong. “It just felt like, here we are. We worked hard. We waited. It was beautiful. And then we just danced the night out.”

More celebrations followed: a spa day for the women, donations of food to the poor. Wafa and Moutaz were still required to keep their distance from each other, a tradition they mostly ignored. They weren’t trying to anger their relatives; this formal celebration period just felt like another barrier to being together.

Finally, they had a party with hundreds of guests. Wafa wore a white, sparkling off-shoulder dress with a sheer cape. Moutaz wore a black tuxedo, his beard shaved close, and a dapper chain clipped to the vest. Their initials hung on the wall in huge gold letters, the W and M intertwined. They went back to a hotel afterward, without secrecy or shame.

They had agreed to write their own vows, but to read them privately. In the hotel, Moutaz pulled out a sheet of paper. To her horror, Wafa realized she had forgotten to write hers.

“He was like, ‘babe, you crossed the ocean for me,’” she recalls, smiling. “‘That’s your vow.”’


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* * *

As Solenn Al Majali points out, Wafa and those like her, whose families have emigrated to escape violence, make up a small and privileged minority of Yemeni citizens. Most remain stuck in Yemen. 

Bordered by only two countries, neither of which is accepting refugees, Yemen remains geographically isolated. Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbor, has been a main player in the conflict. The United States and other Western countries have supplied Saudi Arabia with weapons, tactical assistance, and training. The bombs that fall on Yemen are American-made. In turn, Iran has given some tactical and financial support to the Houthi rebels.

For those who remain, safety has shattered. The United Nations has found that all parties in Yemen share responsibility for war crimes, including “arbitrary deprivation of life, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, gender-based violence, including sexual violence, torture,” and more. Children are greatly at risk for death in airstrikes, but also from common childhood diseases and hunger, for which there is limited medical assistance. Saudi and United Arab Emirates blockades of the ports where Yemenis import food have created famine conditions. According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “More than 16 million people are expected to go hungry [in 2021]. Nearly 50,000 Yemenis are already starving to death in famine-like conditions.”

Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.

Before leaving office, the Trump administration designated the Houthis as terrorists, making international aid delivery trickier. While the Biden administration has reversed this decision and pledged to end support for the conflict, it remains to be seen how much they can disentangle themselves from Saudi allies.

For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape. For Moutaz, that hope is Wafa: “She always find[s] a way out,” he told me.


 

* * *

In the past, Yemen had coffee shops where people could gather and chat. There were seaside towns with beaches along the Indian Ocean. Men chewed qat at house parties, sharing the news. Ancient rammed-earth buildings were beautifully inlaid; brick minarets and winding stone streets were part of a long, proud history of Arab culture, from the Queen of Sheba to rare Islamic manuscripts.

“I keep that beautiful image for my country inside me,” Susan Kassim says.

When she flew back for her daughter’s wedding, the first time she’d been home in five years, her beloved Yemen had been transformed by war. The seaside towns where she had vacationed were destroyed. Community institutions struggled to operate. Buildings had been destroyed in aerial bombing campaigns, leaving swaths of ancient cities in ruins. The highway between Sana’a and Aden, formerly a brisk six-hour drive, was blockaded, forcing her to endure the same harrowing mountain journey her daughter had taken. More than anything, the guns scared her. Armed men patrolled the streets and stopped cars. There was no government, only martial law.

“But people there, they accept the reality. They are not afraid,” says Kassim. Her local relatives teased her that living in the U.S. had made her soft. “And I say no, it’s normal to be afraid. This is horrible.”

To her newlywed daughter and son-in-law, however, the summer of 2019 was bliss. They seemed so elated, Susan asked if they had been taking drugs.

“I’m like, ‘everything is perfect,’” Wafa says. Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it. 

Being together had made them immune to fear — or perhaps it was a deliberate blindness. If they paid attention to the reality of their situation, they could see the precarity of it all. Wafa only had six months of travel allowance before she had to go back to the U.S. Despite court battles, Trump’s travel ban still stood in modified form, and visa processing for Yemeni citizens had ground to a near-halt.

For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape.

Ten days after the wedding, Moutaz got called back to work. Every six months to a year, he was given a new project-based contract by an NGO. He traveled outside the city to small villages, interviewed tribal communities about their needs, and attempted to provide infrastructure: bathrooms, running water, menstruation products, housing. The work fulfilled him, but it was dangerous. Soldiers often stopped his car, demanding to see travel authorization and receive bribes. He would make a few phone calls, and he could keep driving. But Wafa worried about a time when his answers didn’t satisfy them, when his bribe was insufficient, when he didn’t come home.

“It’s living without a government. It’s crazy I would say, because nobody is held accountable at all,” she says.

Moutaz didn’t have much choice. Humanitarian work, paid for by foreign NGOs, was basically the only viable income in Yemen in 2019. Government officials were paid sporadically; teachers had worked for years without pay; private businesses had suffered from ongoing power outages, infrastructure damage, and a shrinking economy.

He knew the risks. This is war, he figured; to survive, Yemenis have to support each other. Against those who threatened his safety, he bowed his head, then persisted. Mostly, he refused to be afraid — a form of defiance that Wafa tried to imitate, especially when her mother begged her to return to Oregon.

“It broke my heart to leave her in that situation that I saw with my own eyes,” says Kassim. Other than official wedding events, Kassim had refused to go out of the house for most of her visit, refused to acknowledge the changed city. She flew home, hopeful that she would reunite with Wafa at the end of the allotted six months.

Wafa wasn’t sure. She felt like she was living in an alternate reality: “We don’t have gas. So what? We walk. We don’t have electricity, so what? We have candles.” 

As the day of her U.S. flight approached, Moutaz refused to say whether he thought she should go. He wanted the decision to be hers. Once, when she woke in the middle of the night, he was sitting up in bed, tearing up. He would miss her, he said, but he felt relief knowing she would be somewhere safe. “So I’ll just trust you,” he told her.

She considered staying. Like so many emigrants, her heart was torn between her old home and her future in the U.S. In the end, she left Moutaz and was allowed back into the United States.

* * *

Love can blind us to reality, binding us only to our beloved — a person, a nation, a memory. We might refuse to see danger, or turn away from transformation, because to acknowledge the horrors of the world would be to betray a beloved relationship. We want to ignore everything except that sweetness.

No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love. They shelter us, protect us, comfort us. When those people live far away, the best we can do is pretend. We wrap their late-night texts and dropped phone calls around us like a blanket, and rapt in a combination of memory and expectation, we close our eyes.

But love can also clarify. For many families separated by national borders, there are hopes of happy endings, but no illusions. Brokenheartedness can become a kind of resting state, which isn’t to say it hurts less — simply that it becomes a kind of ever-present harm. And as anyone who has ever hurt before knows, pain wakes us up. It focuses us, fixes us to the present moment. For some, the pain becomes a kind of a beloved, a stand-in for the real thing. For others, like Wafa, it becomes an itch you can’t stop scratching.

* * *

Wafa struggled to readjust to the U.S. A six-month newlywed, she felt more like a widow. Reckless, angry, she started graduate school and also a full-time job. She was trying, she thinks, to numb herself with endless work.

It wasn’t just missing Moutaz. Going home also meant resuming a role as an immigrant, rather than a citizen. It meant accepting a status shift that she hadn’t realized she resented so much.

“Back in my country, I live in a villa. I have a driver. I have people that do shit for me. Yet when we move here, people don’t know that. We start from zero,” she says. “It hurts … I’m this established person back home, yet here I’m irrelevant.”

That pain had started early. During her own emigration process in 2015, she had flown to Algeria for an interview at the U.S. Embassy. As the passengers disembarked, an officer in the airport asked who was a Yemeni citizen. Without further questions, he told them to get back on the plane and fly home.

“Just having the idea that an officer has the power to kind of humiliate me, target me, and say, ‘just go back to your country,’ I can’t go through that again,” she says. “If I ever have a child, I never want them to get the feeling that [they] are nothing.” 

Wafa wanted to give Moutaz the safety and freedom of the United States, but she increasingly wondered if the process was worth it. Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.


 

* * *

She had four brand-new iPhones in her bag, including two for the man with the ghost ticket. She dialed him when she landed in Cairo, but he didn’t respond. Airport security took her passport, and she had no ticket forward. 

It was July 2020. COVID-19 had transformed the world, including immigration routes. Countries tightened their borders, citing health and safety concerns. One of two routes to Yemen, through Amman, Jordan, closed down. Traveling through Egypt remained the only way back.

Wafa had a ticket to Cairo, and no farther. And now she was stuck in the Cairo airport with no passport.

After eight months of separation, she was trying to get back to Moutaz. She had quit graduate school, thrown herself into work at a bank, and saved her money. She applied for U.S. citizenship. Trump was still president, the travel ban was still in place, COVID had changed the rules, but she had to see her husband again.

If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.

Following a nebulous web of diasporic Yemeni connections, she contacted a man named Khalid in Egypt. He strung her along for a week, promising a ticket in exchange for large amounts of money. Reckless and desperate, she agreed: “This is my last paycheck. I’ll just spend it all and go to zero balance.” She sent him $750 to buy her a Cairo-Aden ticket.

The limited flights from Cairo to Aden were coveted by Yemeni migrants living in Egypt. Over 500,000 Yemenis live in Egypt, according to the Yemeni Embassy in Cairo, more than a 700% increase from before the war. They often come to Egypt or Jordan on two-month visas for medical necessity and remain, applying for refugee status. Many see Egypt as a temporary refuge. They are often stranded in legal limbo, hoping for resettlement, but not recognized as refugees by the United Nations for geopolitical reasons, says Solenn Al Majali. As such, they have little access to resources like jobs, schools, or humanitarian assistance.

Wafa’s class and nationality privilege did not endear her to those she contacted: “I am a lady living in the U.S. trying to go to Yemen, when they [Yemeni refugees] are freaked out.” The people she spoke with had more pressing issues than leisure travel. They were worried about paying rent, buying food, and finding employment. Wafa understood their bitterness.

A few days later, Khalid created a ghost ticket: It looked like a real flight but did not guarantee her a seat on the plane. She would have to trust that someone would cancel so she could fly standby. In exchange for the ghost ticket, he asked her to bring two iPhones to his relatives in Sana’a.

If her first time going back to Yemen had been inadvisable, this time was worse. COVID-19 had killed several members of Wafa’s Yemeni family, including three relatives in a month. People had worn masks for perhaps the first month of the pandemic; after that, a mindset of numbness took over. If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.

Wafa flew to Cairo in July, having spent the last of her money, clutching the ghost ticket like a talisman. After a few terrifying hours, airport security returned her passport, and Khalid texted her a link — for a real ticket to Aden.

* * *

Wafa had been in Sana’a for four months when it came time for Mawlid, the birthday of the Prophet. A traditional Islamic holiday, the 2020 Mawlid celebrations took a different turn. The city was bright with lights (Where did this money come from? Wafa wondered). The Houthis paraded tanks through the streets, and soldiers stood on every corner.

“I felt like they came out of a grave. They had guns and they had paint of green all over them,” she says. The soldiers frightened Wafa; to her, it wasn’t a celebration, but a show of military force. She was beginning to see how deeply the war had infiltrated everyday Yemeni life. Last summer’s newlywed blinders were finally off.

Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it.

There were other signs of change, too. In 2019, Moutaz and Wafa had gone out to coffee shops and enjoyed their favorite snacks in the markets. Now, even married women and men could not associate on the street. Nonprofit work had become more difficult, as the Houthis refused NGO authorizations; Moutaz found himself unemployed for long periods. Due to a Saudi embargo, there was no fuel except at exorbitant black market rates, so they couldn’t drive anywhere. They stayed in their apartment and watched TV.

After the wedding, they had considered staying together in Yemen. A year later, that life seemed impossible. Wafa told Moutaz, “I can’t have a family here where education is corrupted. They teach kids what they want them to know, and it’s all about sacrifice, sacrificing themselves, and it’s just toxic. People don’t have dreams.”

Moutaz knew his wife would not survive long in Yemen. She had always been too big, too bold, too unwilling to follow the rules. Even if she ducked political trouble, her spirit would wither from the restrictions on daily life. He saw it happening already, in the shrinking of their ambitions: Find food. Find a good movie to watch, and an internet connection to watch it.

She told him, “I wanted to go into politics. I wanted to go into law school. I had dreams. But I don’t have dreams here because there’s not even space for dreams.”

* * *

As of winter 2021, Wafa is back in Oregon. Rain falls softly and constantly on the pavement outside. Home is no longer where Moutaz is, as she once thought. Home is the state of waiting, of not acting on her worst impulses to scream in frustration and cause a huge fuss and fly back to him.

The easy route would be to give up on the U.S. Move to Egypt together, or Jordan. Make a new life. The harder, lengthier, more painful route is continued separation. Despite her desire to be with Moutaz, she has chosen not to give up, because his future is more important than her own immediate happiness.

“I want him to have an opportunity to get out and see the world, or just have the power to choose,” she says. 

She wants to give one thing to him and their future children: a U.S. passport. She never wants them to be humiliated, or trapped, or in danger because of their papers. She wants to give them the space to dream.

For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.

He, too, wants more. He doesn’t want to apply every three months for a new NGO job and then face another bout of unemployment. He doesn’t want to take another application test on his Excel skills, or endure invasive background checks, or bribe armed militants on his way to get villagers clean water. He wants to work in engineering, but more importantly, he wants to be his own boss, set his own hours, have power over his future. He wants to see Wafa smile.

“Your smile is the best thing [to] happen in the universe,” he wrote her in a message. 

Does love always resolve? Perhaps a cross-border relationship is less about cathartic reunion than the slow, patient intention to help someone else find joy. Like Wafa, Moutaz says migration is about the fight for his partner’s dreams. National policies may require a shift in how we imagine our futures, but they cannot negate the audacity of wanting a loved one to be safe and happy.

Perhaps love means deferment. Or the refusal to defer. Or the unshakable belief that someday, you’ll walk together to get coffee, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

* * *

Caitlin Dwyer is a writer from Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, Narratively, Creative Nonfiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Quartz, and Oregon Humanities, among others. She holds an MA in journalism from the University of Hong Kong and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She also hosts the podcast Many Roads to Here and teaches at Portland Community College.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Nora Belblidia

No Escape from Online Memories

Pexels

In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a couple uses a medical procedure to erase each other from their memories after the relationship ends. It was a simpler time — that wouldn’t work now. Memories of relationships (and all life events), don’t just exist in our heads anymore, they are online, and online memories are very tricky to destroy

Social media memory prompts popping up over the past year have been challenging for everyone — photos showing our former, blissfully unaware selves, hugging family, having dinner with friends, going to a concert — constant reminders that thanks to the pandemic, we are now sitting at home in our pajamas binge-watching Netflix. But what if social media thinks even bigger life events are still happening? In 2019 Lauren Goode called off her wedding. The internet didn’t get the memo. In this fascinating article for Wired Goode explores what it means to be stalked by “a digital ghost, that is still getting married.”

Even if I could permanently delete my WeddingWire account, I had already shared uncountable bits of data with marketers during the time I used the website. “It’s one thing to say ‘I want to buy shoes’ and then have that ad follow you across the internet,” says Jeremy Tillman. “But there are specific life events that are these exclamation points for marketers. Like, I’m going to get married! Or, I’m going to have a kid! And the more valuable that data is, the more intrusive it seems.”

Tillman is the president of Ghostery, which offers an open source browser extension that shows you how many trackers are receiving data from the websites you visit—a mere glimpse at the network of data brokers that are creating shadow profiles of you. While I was on the phone with Tillman, I punched WeddingWire.com into a Chrome browser, navigated to a page for a wedding DJ, then clicked on the Ghostery extension. At least 16 trackers were identified—including Google Ads, DoubleClick, and Facebook Custom Audience. I had browsed web pages like this dozens of times in 2019. And then, suddenly, I had stopped.

“In your case, you have the life cycle of somebody that you’re not, following you throughout the web and beyond,” Tillman says. “It’s like a ghost life cycle that you never had the chance to live out.”

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by: Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Karen Hao, Rebecca Solnit, Mary H.K. Choi, and Andrew Buss.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers

Alec MacGillis | ProPublica | March 8, 2021 | 38 minutes (9,654 words)

“In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.”

2. How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation

Karen Hao | Technology Review | March 11, 2021 | 26 minutes (6,600 words)

“The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.”

3. John Muir in Native America

Rebecca Solnit | Sierra Magazine | March 2, 2021 | 16 minutes (4,210 words)

“Muir’s romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil.”

4. My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage

Mary H.K. Choi | GQ | March 2, 2021 | 12 minutes (3,068 words)

“All the pain of the past year taught me something: the true nature of intimacy.”

5. Bad Reputation: An Oral History of the Freaks and Geeks Soundtrack

Andrew Buss | Consequence of Sound | March 8, 2021 | 38 minutes (9,600 words)

“Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Michael Andrews, and the cast and crew turn things up to 11.”

Don’t F**K With the Pet Detectives

Laura Breiling

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 112, “Cat and Mouse,” by writer Phil Hoad. With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.

Phil Hoad | The Atavist | February 2021 | 5 minutes (1,558 words)

 

The Atavist is Longreads‘ sister publication. For 10 years, it has been a digital pioneer in long-form narrative journalism, publishing one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a magazine member.

It was the body on the south London doorstep that got everyone’s attention. On the bright morning of September 23, 2015, a woman walked outside her home to find a cream-and-coffee-colored pelt, like a small furry Pierrot. It had dark forelegs, and its face was a smoky blot. It was a cat, slit throat to belly; its intestines were gone.

The woman rang the authorities, who came and disposed of the body. Three days later, she looked at a leaflet that had come through her mail slot, asking whether anyone had seen Ukiyo, a four-year-old ragdoll mix whose coat matched that of the dead cat. The woman broke the bad news to Ukiyo’s owner, Penny Beeson, who lived just down Dalmally Road, a nearly unbroken strip of poky, pebble-dashed row houses in the Addiscombe area of Croydon.

Beeson was inconsolable. “I shook for the whole day,” she later told The Independent.

“R.I.P ukiyo I feel devastated,” her son, Richard, posted on Facebook. “Hacked to death and left on someone’s doorstep. Some people are so sick!”

A few days later, Addiscombe’s letter boxes clacked again as another leaflet was delivered. This one warned that Ukiyo’s demise wasn’t an isolated incident—there had been a troubling spate of cat deaths in the area. The leaflet was printed by a local group called South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty, or SNARL.

Tony Jenkins, one of SNARL’s founders, had recently become his own master. At 51, with a reassuring, yeomanly face and a golden tinge at the very tip of his long, gray ponytail, Jenkins was laid off after 25 years working for a nearby government council. He hadn’t gotten along with his boss, so getting sacked came as something of a relief. With a year’s severance in his pocket, “I was enjoying my downtime,” Jenkins said. That included being with his girlfriend, a 44-year-old South African who went by the name Boudicca Rising, after the first-century Celtic warrior queen who fought the Romans to save the Britons. Among other things, Rising and Jenkins shared feelings of guardianship toward animals. Their homes at one point housed 34 cats, a dog, two gerbils, and a cockatoo between them. The couple had formed SNARL together.

Scanning Facebook one day in September 2015, about a week before Ukiyo was found dead, Jenkins stumbled upon a post from the nearby branch of the United Kingdom’s largest veterinarian chain, Vets4Pets, that described four gruesome local incidents in the past few weeks: a cat with its throat cut, one with a severed tail, another decapitated, and a fourth with a slashed stomach. Only the final cat had survived. Jenkins told Rising about the post. “That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “We need to do some digging.”

Digging was her forte. Always impeccably dressed, with an ornate gothic kick, and unfailingly in heels, Rising was a multitasking demon on a laptop. By day she worked for an office management company. By night she was part of the global alliance of animal rights activists. She was one of many people who used small details in online videos of a man torturing felines to identify the culprit, a Canadian man named Luka Magnotta. He was reported to police, who didn’t take the allegations seriously, and Magnotta went on to murder and chop up his lover in 2012—a crime recounted in the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k with Cats.

On the heels of Ukiyo’s death, Rising and Jenkins distributed SNARL’s leaflets throughout Addiscombe, warning of the threat to local felines. While to an uninterested eye some of the attacks might have appeared to be the indiscriminate cruelty of nature—the work of a hungry predator, say—SNARL believed they might be a series of linked and deliberate killings. Whether the crimes were perpetrated by an individual or a group SNARL wasn’t sure. It hoped the leaflets would help turn up more information.

SNARL soon had reports of more incidents in the area, for a total of seven: one cat missing, two with what SNARL subsequently described as “serious injuries,” and four dead. Rising said that vets who saw the deceased cats’ bodies told her the mutilations had been made with a knife. On September 29, SNARL sent out an alert on its Facebook page saying as much. The cats’ wounds, the group insisted, “could only have been inflicted by a human. Their bodies have been displayed in such a way as to cause maximum distress.”

That was SNARL’s official line. On Rising’s personal page she went further, emphasizing her belief that Addiscombe was dealing with a serial killer. “This is a psychopath,” she wrote.

While to an uninterested eye some of the attacks might have appeared to be the indiscriminate cruelty of nature, SNARL believed they might be a series of linked and deliberate killings.

On the afternoon of October 24, 2015, two miles southeast of Addiscombe, 47-year-old Wayne Bryant picked his way over the fallen leaves of Threehalfpenny Wood, named for a 19th-century murder victim found there with that sum of money in his pocket. The dry autumn air kept Bryant alert as his wide-spaced blue eyes scanned left and right and he listened to the wind hissing through the oak canopy. Bryant’s cat, Amber, like many domestic felines, kept regular hours with her comings and goings, but the previous day she hadn’t returned in the mid-afternoon as she usually did. When Amber didn’t show up the following morning, Bryant and his wife, Wendy, formed a search party.

A few years before, Bryant had suffered a serious spinal injury at work, causing a leak of cerebrospinal fluid and, eventually, several hematomas. Animals had always been a big part of his life—he and Wendy had a menagerie of rescue pets, from dogs to guinea pigs to lizards—but as he struggled with memory problems and long-term unemployment, the emotional support they provided became irreplaceable. Bryant had had Amber for eight years, since she was a six-week-old kitten. “A friendly little thing,” he told the website AnimalLogic. “A little curtain-climber.”

As they searched the woods, Bryant’s wife called to him. In a small clearing off a path, sheltered by a cluster of exposed tree roots, the ball of black and orange fur was unmistakable. But Amber was headless and tailless, except for that appendage’s very tip, which had been placed on her belly. The couple were sickened. They shrouded their beloved pet in a towel and took her home. Then Bryant remembered an article in the Croydon Advertiser about a group convinced that several recent cat killings were all connected.

A couple of hours later, Jenkins and Rising were at Bryant’s door. “I remember Wayne’s first words to me: ‘Ain’t no fox did that,’” Jenkins told me. “If I ever write a book about this, that’s what I’d call it.”

It was the first time either Jenkins or Rising had come face-to-face with a suspected cat killing. Neither of them had any forensics training. Unwrapping the towel that held Amber, they noted the clean severing of her head and tail, which seemed to corroborate Bryant’s view that no animal could be responsible. They asked the family to show them the crime scene. There was no blood on the ground, meaning that either her injuries were inflicted after death or Amber was killed elsewhere and moved to the spot in Threehalfpenny Wood where her owners found her. Rising and Jenkins took Amber’s body to a vet for further examination.

Bryant gave a statement to the police, and Rising went to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the UK’s main animal welfare charity. She later claimed that a representative brushed her off, saying that a fox probably killed Amber. Besides, the RSPCA dealt primarily with instances of cruelty in which the victims were still alive: It received more than 11,000 complaints a year in Greater London alone.

Jenkins was incredulous when he heard about the RSPCA’s response. “Although Croydon’s got a bad reputation, a lot of crime, I don’t think our foxes carry knives. And foxes certainly do not kill cats,” he said. At least, “it’s very, very rare.” He doubted that scavenging creatures would be interested in removing and eating feline heads and tails. Rather, they’d go for the nutritious internal organs, and SNARL hadn’t seen that kind of damage in any killing other than Ukiyo’s.

In October, there was another suspected cat killing in Croydon. Then SNARL began to get reports from farther afield, one in neighboring Mitcham and two in nearby West Norwood. Nick Jerome’s cat, Oscar, was found headless on his street. “None of us went to pieces over it, but it was obviously distressing at the time,” he said. In Coulsdon, on the southern edge of Croydon, David Emmerson discovered his cat, Missy, decapitated and tailless. His 18-year-old daughter, already struggling with the loss of her aunt the previous year, was devastated. Emmerson never told his autistic son the full story of what happened. The truth was too ugly. “I never grew up as a cat person,” he said, “but maybe because we got her as a kitten, she became one of us. Mine was the lap she chose to sit on when she sat down. I’m not sure why. I adored her.”

The RSPCA had its party line and wasn’t getting involved, but that didn’t stop the local press, which knew a good story when it heard one. By mid-November, reporters had made a lurid christening: The Croydon Cat Killer was on the prowl.

Read the full story at The Atavist

“Mark Changed the Rules”

Longreads Pick
Source: BuzzFeed News
Published: Feb 21, 2021
Length: 17 minutes (4,290 words)

The Geography Closest In

Photo by Mats Silvan/Getty Images. Edit by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

Miranda Ward | Adrift | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | January 2021 | 15 minutes (4,339 words)

The bald conclusiveness of a positive pregnancy test draws a clear line between yes/no, this/that, knowing/not-­knowing. For a moment at least it clarifies everything, or distils it, into a single and irrefutable piece of knowledge. This certainty, when it comes to the body, is rare (later a doctor will tell me: if everything in medicine were as reliable as a pregnancy test, my job would be a lot easier), so I hold on to that piece of knowledge, which is proof of my own productivity, for as long as I can.

But doubt, worry, have a way of threading their way through even the solidest conviction. Threat is everywhere: a light fever, an undercooked egg. Indeed the more I read the more I realise how fragile a pregnancy is, how it isn’t as simple as a positive test and a baby nine months later, which is something I suppose I always knew in the abstract but never had any real frame of reference for before. I was aware that some of my friends and acquaintances, for example, had had miscarriages, but I had not until now really understood what it meant, in both practical and emotional terms, to have to hold an awareness of this terrible possibility always alongside a hope, a longing, for it not to happen to you. Most of what I know about pregnancy, in fact, comes from fiction, from books, films, TV: the way certain signifiers – wooziness, weakness, nausea – are used to suggest a pregnancy before it is confirmed; the way, once it is confirmed, a woman must somehow both alter her behaviour drastically and hardly at all, vomiting copiously into a bin at work seconds before giving a presentation just as if nothing is amiss, but studiously avoiding, suddenly, a whole litany of food and drink; most of all the way a baby is almost always the inevitable result of a pregnancy. The plain fact of it – that at least one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, perhaps more, since sometimes a woman might miscarry before she even knows she’s pregnant – had somehow eluded me, or else I had somehow failed to think of it in tangible terms.

What does that statistic actually mean, practically speaking? It means that nothing is a given. It means that there are people – a lot of people – for whom the result of a pregnancy is not a baby. It means that even the purest elation is often shaded, especially in the early weeks, when miscarriage is most likely, with fear.

I develop a set of superstitions for protection; certain shirts for luck, certain routes home from the library or the grocery store, certain songs skipped or repeated. An aping at control. And for a while everything is normal, in the sense that nothing is normal, in the sense that I feel slightly ill, weary, a little as if I am not myself. My overriding emotion is happiness, but there is also a part of me that feels as if I have become separated somehow from my body, as if it is acting of its own accord, and the thinking part of me is just along for the ride. There are psychological adjustments to make – I have to play the phrase I’m pregnant over and over to myself to believe it; I have to think about what is good for me not in terms of my body only, but also in terms of the invisible body-­to­-be inside me. There are physical symptoms, too, though they are mild (another thing I didn’t realise: that while some pregnant women are indeed debilitated by illness or weariness, not everyone is). I am never actually sick, though I am dogged by a whisper of nausea that asserts itself at odd times and leads me to keep a pack of digest­ives on my bedside table. I can feel a largeness, a tenderness, to my breasts, and although I know it’s far too early for the pregnancy itself to show I feel fuller somehow, heavier than I was before I knew, as if the knowledge itself has some weight or substance to it.

This is not an unpleasant feeling – because it is a novelty, and because the pregnancy is so unequivocally desired – but it is hard to escape a sense of uneasiness, too. I find myself tracing familiar routes around Oxford, where I’ve lived for years, ever since I moved to the UK after university; I know the roads well, and yet I feel every encounter between feet and pavement to be different now, because I am differently bodied. What I have is a sense, visceral and unignor­able, that my body no longer belongs wholly to me – and in a way it doesn’t. As I walk I feel not exactly a ‘we’, but a blooming plurality, an ‘I and…’, perhaps, the assertion of a possibility taking physical form. Where once I occupied my mind during walks with long, elaborate daydreams, there now seems to be no room for anything other than the immediacy of experience and the planning and execution of the tasks of my own daily life. I take to listening to radio shows and podcasts, tuning out my external surroundings and internal circumstances, focusing on the minute details of, say, a true crime story, losing myself in the voice of the presenter.

* * *

Geographers write about the inseparability of the body from our experience of place: we sense places, are bodily present in them, see them, hear them, smell them, move within them. How else do we know a favourite room or city or mountain trail? The body, as Tim Edensor writes, is the means through which we experience and feel the world.

To which he adds: bodies are not only written upon but also write their own feelings upon a space in a process of continual remaking.

What I am struck by in the delicate earliest weeks of pregnancy is that I am being both made and unmade; rewritten. The pregnancy is largely unspoken of: we have told our doctor, and our parents, which perhaps lends it a weight in the world that it wouldn’t yet have had we not told anyone, but day to day I move through the hours without anyone but us knowing, because the pregnancy is still invisible. When I stand in front of the mirror I see nothing different, but nothing the same, either. When I go to the swimming pool, as I do most mornings, an almost religious habit, the place of it has shifted, though the change is microscopic, under the surface. On a quiet morning I watch the play of sunlight on the bottom of the pool and I am in a foreign country. In the changing room, pulling off my wet suit after a shower, I am self­-conscious for the first time – can they tell? But I want them to tell, even though there’s no way they possibly could, even though when I think of it I have the sense not so much of the world tilting on its axis but of the axis itself having drifted elsewhere. I smile knowingly at a visibly pregnant woman undressing and she looks away, uncomprehending or embarrassed or both. I am the foreign country, or else I have lost the map of this place. Walking home, along the same roads I have always taken, the green of the trees fading into yellow, I feel somehow both lonely and plural.

* * *

And then.

One morning, a few weeks after that first definitive, positive test, I wake up and feel my old self again – that is to say, not ill, not weary, not plural or novel – and that evening I experience some mild pain, a quick gush of blood which soon slows to an ambiguous but ominous trickle, and a sense of doom. I am not sure what the appropriate reaction is: denial? Despair? I cannot summon the energy to cook or even to eat dinner; although it is still early I retire to bed, lying on top of the duvet, curled into a question mark. Alexander lies down next to me, his body settling around mine. He tells me the things I both want and don’t want to hear: that it’s OK, that we don’t know for sure that anything’s wrong yet, that he loves me. He’s meant to be playing football in twenty minutes. Do you want me to stay? he says. I’ll stay with you. No, I say vehemently, as if this is in fact an uncharitable suggestion, you should go, you should play, what can you do at this point, what can I do? Nothing. Even after he’s pulled his socks over his shinpads, laced up his boots, he hesitates at the door: are you sure you don’t want me to stay? I don’t want you to stay, I say emphatically. If I were being honest – with him, with myself – I’d say exactly the opposite: stay, please. Instead I lie back and stare at the wall for an hour until he gets home and we go to sleep.

The next morning I call my GP, who arranges an emergency scan for me at the hospital. The soonest the scan can be done is in two days, so in the interim period I carry on as usual: I go to meetings, answer emails, run errands. It’s not as hard to do this as I would have imagined it would be, and after all, what choice do I have? But it’s also indicative of the ongoingness that will characterise much of the next two months.

I cannot summon the energy to cook or even to eat dinner; although it is still early I retire to bed, lying on top of the duvet, curled into a question mark.

I would have imagined, too, that a miscarriage was a definite thing – yes/no, this/that, knowing/not­-knowing – a neatly shaped happening with a beginning, a middle, a definitive end, each closely following the other. Women say, ‘I had a miscar­riage’, and until now I have always heard their experience as being something contained, even while brutally uncontrollable: all those stories of blood-­drenched bathroom floors, of unimag­inable agony, of horror and shock, of sadness and then resolution (often in the form of a baby arriving a year or two on, as if some consolation must always be offered): what I understand now, of course, is that these stories are told retrospectively, packaged in the way that all stories, to some extent, must be. But when I phone the doctor I’m unsure, grammatically speaking, how to phrase my concern: do I say to him that I have had a miscarriage, that I’m having one, that I’m worried I might have one in the future? The idea of the miscarriage in progress perplexes the part of me that imagined that this is a thing that can only happen privately, violently, suddenly, because it is a thing that is happening without much noise at all, and meanwhile here I am transcribing an interview, here I am meeting with a freelance client, wearing a new skirt I bought yesterday from the charity shop, here I am buying groceries and planning dinner, with nothing but a question mark inside me.

Alexander and I take a taxi to the hospital for the scan; it’s early morning and the driver is playing loud Pakistani pop, which is somehow soothing, and drowns out my own thoughts. In the waiting room Alexander scrolls restlessly through his phone. A little plastic radio on a cabinet in the corner of the room is pumping out cheerful tunes punctuated by cheerful radio host banter. I take my book from my handbag and lay it on my knees, open at my marked place. Knausgaard, A Death in the Family. In his younger-­self narrative, the author’s father has just died, while in his current­-self narrative, his partner is heavily pregnant, lumbering around, practically bursting with new life. But I cannot read on. I become fixated on a single paragraph, a description of a piece of artwork, which strikes me as incomprehensible. I read it over and over again until my name is called.

The scan reveals an embryo with no heartbeat. I lie on the bed, naked from the waist down, a blue plastic sheet draped over my legs. Alexander holds my hand while the ultrasound technician swirls a wand around inside me, talking us through the image of my uterus on the screen. It is illegible to me – darkness, light, hazy shapes – but to her the meaning is crystal clear. I’m so sorry it’s not the news you were hoping for, she says. She gives me a wad of tissue to wipe myself with before leaving the room to let me get dressed. She leads us back to the waiting room, which is fuller now, no one making eye contact, the radio still humming; a doctor will see you soon, she says, to talk to you about what happens next. ‘Soon’ is an ambiguous word, and time becomes difficult to perceive; we are there for what feels like both an eternity and an instant. I take my book out again, stare again at that same page; Alexander unlocks his phone, moves his finger across the screen in a kind of robotic motion.

What I am struck by in the delicate earliest weeks of pregnancy is that I am being both made and unmade; rewritten.

Sometimes these things resolve naturally, the doctor says when we are finally called in to see her; sometimes intervention becomes necessary, or desirable. She schedules me for another scan the following week, so we can monitor whether there’s been any change: in other words, whether the products of conception, as the embryo is now known, have been partially or even wholly expelled. After the scan, she says, we can decide how to proceed; you don’t need to make any decisions now. Good, I think, though I’m a little hazy on exactly what kind of decision I might be called upon to make; she has described the various forms of intervention but I can’t quite situate them in relation to my own body, my own products of conception.

She is very young, the doctor, soft-­spoken, apologetic. She says to call if anything changes before my next appointment, if I have any concerns. She gives me a business card, circles a phone number that’s operational 24/7. To minimise the risk of infection, she adds, seemingly as an afterthought, you shouldn’t take baths or swim.

No swimming. Of course. But I am thrown by the thought of this: the removal of the most obvious physical coping mechanism I have for dealing with what is essentially an entirely uncontrollable physical situation. I realise I’ve said this out loud without really meaning to. A silence falls, either respectful or uncomfortable.

I’m a swimmer too, the doctor says suddenly, as I’m standing to leave, abandoning, briefly, her professional distance. I’d hate not to be able to do it.

After the appointment we walk to a Starbucks near the hospital. It’s dark and anonymous inside, and smells of sweet pastries and wee. I order a latte, two shots, why not, and we sit at a counter at the window, watching buses trundle by. It’s mid­-morning and the place is full of new mothers and their prams, though occasionally someone in scrubs or a suit hurries in and then out again. Alexander texts his boss to say he won’t be coming in to work today. Not just the day but the month, the year, stretches out before us, suddenly open. What will we do with it? What can we do? The coffee is too hot, tasteless, the milk burned, but I suck it down in a rush, turning the inside of my mouth furry. Before all this, the test, the pregnancy, the ungrowing embryo, we were planning a wedding; we had set the date, hired a venue, made arrangements with the registrar. We should have cancelled everything – my due date was too close to the wedding date – but we never did; too superstitious, or preoccupied, or both. Now, of course, I say, devastated, amused, we won’t need to change the date. We can simply pick up where we left off. I feel myself begin to rewrite the map again, to slip in and out of familiarity with myself and my surroundings. There’s a simplicity to it all, underneath the ambiguity, the anguish, that makes me almost giddy: for what is this but a reversion to my natural state, a return to old routines?

A thought – terrible, comforting – hits me square in the face then, that there’s relief to be felt. The awful thing, the dreaded thing, has happened, and I need no longer fear it. I hate myself for feeling this but can’t let go of it, either, because I think it’s a way forward, a way out, a small tremble of light.

* * *

The second scan is no more or less enlightening than the first: there is still an embryo, there is still no heartbeat. No change, in other words: an unwanted stillness.

The doctor gives me a leaflet, which outlines in clinical language the three ways of managing a miscarriage when preg­nancy tissue remains in the womb: expectant, medical, surgical. The first is the wait-­and-­see approach, taken on the assumption that the tissue will pass naturally out of the womb with time. The second involves taking a course of medication to stimulate the passing of the tissue out of the womb: a potentially painful, lengthy, and often messy process, not always entirely effective, sometimes necessitating the third approach anyhow, which involves surgical removal of the tissue.

I still don’t know how to decide what to do, so I put it off: if nothing’s happened in a few weeks I’ll opt for some kind of intervention. I want above all to trust my body to do whatever needs doing, but already it’s betrayed me once, so what do I know?

Still no swimming, obviously, the doctor says sadly. Other­wise, proceed as normal.

As normal. Nothing is normal, I start to think – but then again, in a kind of terrible way, everything is normal again, isn’t it?

* * *

The present­-tenseness of the event, the miscarriage, which is not so much an event as a continual unfolding of uncharted territory, a vast grey area, makes it virtually impossible to talk about in any way that makes sense of what is actually happening. I don’t know what to tell people because the language I have is not elastic enough to encompass something which is past, present and future all at once. So I do what the doctor suggests: I proceed more or less as normal, going to meetings, going to the supermarket, scrolling mindlessly through Twitter, doing the laundry, eating, sleeping, working. I let myself lose track of time. At one point, in a notebook, next to a to-­do list, I write: The calendar is a kind of enemy, reminding me of the facts of things, the time it is actively taking to go through this process of miscarriage. I take to walking – long, slow strolls at the very edge of dusk, through parks and quiet suburban neighbourhoods that smell of woodsmoke and exhaust fumes. I feel my muscles going slack, and an irrational fear grows daily: what will my body become while I can’t swim?

My fear is really a form of vanity. I know that with each day or week that passes without a swim my body will start to look subtly different. I’ll lose, am losing, the public indicators of my fitness – the muscle, the shape of my arms and legs, the things that say to other people that I’m disciplined, that my body is under control. And I don’t want them to see what I know: that nothing is under control, that this body is not working properly, that athletically, reproductively, it is not doing at all what it’s supposed to do.

Mostly, though, if we’re honest, it’s the changes in our bodies that are in control of us, not the other way round.

Words come to me on my walks, as they used to on my swims. Some of them are obvious. Why is this happening to me? I think selfishly, inevitably, as I climb the hill to the park on a soft bed of wet leaves, fresh-­fallen after a night of howling wind. But other things, too, drifting like the smoke and the fumes. Disobedience. Betrayal. Softening, slackening, slowing. Undisciplined. Back at home, in my notebook, I write: I guess I feel disconnected from a part of myself. Not that I’m not still the same person or can’t be again, but that for a while I and some other part of me are not quite coinciding. I’m talking about the swimming, not the miscarriage, or at least ostensibly I am. I have a deep sense of geographical dissonance, like a dream of a familiar place in which the location of everything is slightly wrong, so that you round the corner and suddenly come upon a street that should be miles away, or discover that all along there has been an extra room in your house.

One Sunday afternoon, sitting in a booth at my local pub, I see a woman I used to see most weekday mornings at the pool; she always wore a bright pink cap, a navy swimsuit. She’s about my age, sitting with a friend, eating lunch. Perhaps it’s her local too, I think, for the first time realising, stupid as it sounds, that these people I’ve been brushing up against at the pool are people with lives outside that context, just like me.

Occasionally I log on to Facebook and check the page for the triathlon club I belong to. I look through the list of times from a recent 400-­metre time trial, spotting familiar names, noting the improvements, and wonder how much I, too, could have improved by now. For a moment I’m gripped by something which feels a little like jealousy but isn’t quite – desire, perhaps, something almost carnal. But then the desire, or whatever it is, fades: I’m here now, and maybe, if I can admit it to myself, I’m actually a little relieved that I’m not sweating away in a pool, that I don’t have to worry about how fast or smoothly I can cut through the water, how hungry I’ll be later, how tired.

* * *

The poles of the earth have wandered, the journalist John McPhee once wrote: even that which seems most permanent and solid is, in its own way, shifting. It’s true literally – think for example of the tectonic plates, the movement of the continents, which still, on average, drift a few centimetres a year apart, about the rate at which our fingernails grow, as the geographer Doreen Massey frames it, a reminder that the body is never in stasis either. In other words the whole world is a continual work in progress; the present is not some kind of achieved terminus, Massey writes. To underline this idea, she describes the slow movement of what she calls the ‘migrant rocks’ that came, over the course of millions of years, to form Skiddaw in the Lake District. Solid and eternal as it seems, she says, the mountain is not timeless. Like she and her sister, staying in a hotel in Keswick, it’s just passing through. It was once elsewhere. It will be elsewhere again someday.

It’s easy to lose your footing here, to feel that nothing is solid, but I’ve always found something comforting about this idea that place is essentially unfixed. The rigidity of permanence would be too much to bear, surely: who wants to be stuck in the same place forever? Who can know and love anywhere and not see that a point on a map is one thing, a living, breathing place quite another?

It’s a concept that scales well – if the world is a work in progress, then so too is a city or a street or a swimming pool. So too is the body, which is, after all, as the poet Adrienne Rich puts it, the geography closest in; it’s the first place, the place we must make peace with – subject, like all places, to the pressures of time, of external rhythms and events, changing from moment to moment, year to year, getting older, bigger, smaller, more or less capable of performing certain tasks, more or less like it was at the beginning.

There’s a simplicity to it all, underneath the ambiguity, the anguish, that makes me almost giddy: for what is this but a reversion to my natural state, a return to old routines?

Sometimes we’re in control of that change, or we think we are. Exercise in particular gives us the illusion of power over our own physical futures. Take your recommended thirty minutes of activity a day and stave off all kinds of bodily evil. Lose a bit of weight, add a bit of muscle, establish a routine, live forever, or longer, anyway. The geographer John Bale wrote of exercise as a literal form of recreation: through time, repeated action, the body is re-­created so that it works better. It incorporates knowledge, becomes stronger, fitter. Progress. Maybe next week, or the week after, I’ll be faster than I was last week. All it takes is discipline, resolve, another few thousand metres racked up. Most of all denial: of the body that wants, of the possibility of vulnerability or limitation. A few years ago, I remember, I became obsessed with watching Olympic swimming races; I trawled YouTube, read interviews with the athletes, fascinated by all their talk of sacrifice and discipline. And isn’t this why I watched in the first place? To see what happens when we write certain kinds of want out of our body, and one singular, possessive, demanding want into it: to be the best, the fastest, the one standing on the highest platform of the podium?

Mostly, though, if we’re honest, it’s the changes in our bodies that are in control of us, not the other way round. The fact of the matter is that not that long ago, my body was capable of run­ning 13.1 miles, of swimming 3,000 metres without complaint; not that long ago, my body was actually hosting another body, or the beginnings of one.

And now everything is different, and everything will be different again someday, and different again, and different again.

This excerpt has been lightly adapted for publication on Longreads.

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Miranda Ward is a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer. Her memoir Adrift: Fieldnotes from Almost-Motherhood is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. She grew up on a cattle ranch in California and now lives in Oxford.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands