Medford, MA – April 2020

At the end of 2019 I moved back to the US after living in Jordan for four years (and after I quit my job working in Zaatari Camp). I moved in with my sister and other housemates in Medford, MA.

About two months later, the pandemic upended everything, and Raja and I, newly married, got stuck on opposite sides of the planet. Two weeks after our wedding in Boston, he’d traveled back to Amman just before Jordan shut down all commercial flights due to COVID-19.

I’ll never forget the exact date and time that the Amman airport closed: March 16, 2020 at midnight. I wrote this essay in the early days of that separation, when we’d only been separated for two weeks.

This morning I woke up at the crack of dawn, though there was hardly any daylight because it was raining so hard. My stomach hurt. I went down to my car in the rain.

I drove through mostly empty streets, past a deserted Tufts campus, listening to Brandi Carlile on Spotify, looking out through the streaks, the rivers, the rivulets of rain on the windshield at my old college. So many memories there. It’s shut down now due to COVID.