1
" Since the news was out about my MS, out with my Dad, my friends, and soon with Hanna, it emerged in the real world.
Like a boggart from Harry Potter's world, it took shape in front of me. Unmoving, but relentlessly forcing itself into my thoughts. My MS, it was real now.
I didn't want to climb the ladder to finish painting the room. I was scared to.
I wasn't part of any Hogwarts houses, because there wasn't a house for people who'd rather tuck away, overwhelmed with fear. "
― S.K. Ali , Love From A to Z
4
" It was the tick marks above my bed, underneath the bunk on top of mine, that got me thinking about when I'd last extended my hand to anyone. Or anyone extended their hand to me.
Someone who lived in the dorm before me had recorded their days at university like a prison sentence, carving into the wooden slats under Jarred's bed, and, one night a week ago, reaching up to run a finger over the tallies, I touched the gnawing in me. I realized it had worked its way around inside, gouging, for a while. It must be a hole I've carried since the start of freshman year. (Though sometimes I wonder if it carried over from years before that.)
Simple tally marks etched with a pocketknife woke me to my hollowness. "
― S.K. Ali , Love From A to Z
7
" The world is a mysterious place. On the one hand, its size can be measured and recorded and verified. Its marvels and oddities captured in complex, empirical detail.
On the other hand, its size is relative to our mind’s perception of it. Its marvels and oddities only extending to how far our vision goes.
For some of us, this means the world is small, including only those we see as belonging to it. People related to us, people who look like us, dress like us, think like us.
For others, it’s medium-size and includes those we connect to through some similarity, some trait that pings familiarity within, which then allows us to overlook the differences between us and them.
And then there are those who see the world as huge, as the actual size it measurably is.
Huge enough to include vast differences, people with nothing in common with one another except a beating heart and a feeling soul, these two—heart, soul—being the strongest connection between us all. "
― S.K. Ali , Love From A to Z
