Kosovo Love Quotes

It wasn’t beautiful. A Winter wedding is a union of elation and depression, red velvet blankets in a cheap motel room stained with semen from sex devoid of meaning, and black mold clinging to the fringe of floral shower curtains like a heap of dead forevers. You sat down at the foot of the bed, looking at me like I had already
driven away. I was thinking about watching CNN. How fucked up is that? I wanted to know that your second hand, off-white dress, and my black polyester bow tie wasn’t as tragic as a hurricane devouring a suburb, or a train derailment in no where, Virginia, ending the lives of two young college hopefuls. I was naïve. I thought that there were as many right ways to feel love as the amount of
 pubic hair, 
 belly lint, and 
scratch marks abandoned by lovers in our honeymoon suite. When you looked at me in bed that night, I put my hand on your chest to feel a little more human. I don’t know what to call you; a name does not describe the aches, or lack of. This love is unusual and comfortable. If you were to leave, I know I’d search for days, in newspapers and broadcasts, in car accidents and exposés on genocide in Kosovo. (How do I address this? How is one to feel about a love without a name?) My heart would be ambivalent, too scared to look for you behind the curtains of the motel window, outside in the abyss of powder and pay phones because I don’t know how to love you. -Kosovo

The first time someone suggested that I write about my adventures was when I had just arrived in Lebanon. He looked at me with sincere curiosity, puzzled too. We were seated in a large kitchen at a friend’s house, having lunch. It was a beautiful yellow brick house, on top of a hill, very bright, the garden in bloom, wonderful colors and my story of poverty and gloom in Kosovo couldn’t be a greater contrast. We drank lovely Lebanese white wine, ate warm flatbread with labneh, foul, sujuk, and plenty of other mezze dishes.

the midst of the ruins—in the premature death of a loved one, in the hell on earth we call a crack house, in the ache of a heartbreak, in the sheer malevolence of Kosovo and Rwanda—the presence of God abides. The trusting disciple, often through clenched teeth, says, in effect, God is still trustworthy, but not because of unrestricted power on my behalf, he is trustworthy because of a promise given and sustained in Christian communities throughout generations.8