“Before the war--” Basma starts, and then she pauses, because there are some things she needs me to understand, first, before she tells me any of the rest of this. “We were people before the war,” she explains. “Our time was in a straight line.”

It is jagged, now. It runs in loopedy-loops and knots. It is sideways and upside-down.

“Today, Asmaa and Sumya are five years old and three years old,” she tells me. “They turned five years old and three years old this year, and Asmaa’s birthday is in a few days, and she is turning five years old. Before the war, two years ago, Asmaa and Sumya were five years old and three years old-- and a year before that, they were four years old and two years old… do you understand? Next year, they will turn ten and eight-- do you understand? The next year after that, Sumya will be born, and she will be so beautiful-- I will hold her in my arms and I will cry all over again, just like with Asmaa and Hamoud-- I am a failure; I will never become used to it.”

Before the war-- she still calls it a war-- she still went to the marketplace instead of the grocery stores, never mind that there were still grocery stores. I never grew up with a marketplace like that, I tell her. Here, grocery stores are really all there is, aside from a farmer’s market every now and then, and those are great, but you have to plan around going to them, and sometimes the prices can be a lot higher. Maybe that’s one of the tragedies of life, here, I tell her. Maybe everyone would choose to go to the marketplace instead if they lived in a part of the world where that was common, like India, or China, or Gaza. No, no, she tells me-- “It’s the shopping cart,” she tells me. They tried it once, booking a taxi from their house, where they had been living, to a grocery store nearby, “and Asmaa and Sumya spent the entire time fighting over whose turn it was to ride in the shopping cart. They were screaming and crying and hitting each other, and I had to take them out of there without buying anything.”

It wasn’t their fault, she tells me. They were five and three, and those are not easy. It is the odd numbers, she tells me, or it is the prime numbers, or it is the numbers that add up to eight. It’s better to be two and four. It’s better to be four and six.

“It’s better in the marketplace because there’s nothing to ride in; one of them can hold one of my hands, and the other can hold my other hand, and each of them can hold one of our bags for the fruits and the vegetables and what else.”

She tells me a story about trying to go back to the supermarket and using baskets instead of a cart-- one for each of the girls-- but they just spent the whole time crying about not having a cart when they could see that the other families with their own little girls had carts, and half of the time on top of that they were fighting over whose basket would hold what.

“They never fight in the marketplace about whose bag will hold what; only whose basket.”

Basma tells me a story about when she was little, going to the supermarket with her mother and her two sisters. She tells me a story about when she was little, climbing up a palm tree and then jumping down like a superhero, and hurting her ankle. She always got to ride in the cart because her ankle was hurt, and then after that, her two sisters were too big to fit, so she kept on riding in the cart. She tells me a story about when she was little, trying to play tennis indoors and breaking a picture frame. She tells me a story about wanting to roller-skate. She tells me a story about stealing her sister’s colored-pencils. She tells me a story about something that she used to watch on television-- did I ever see that, too?-- did I ever watch that here, in my part of the world? We find it online and we watch it together for a minute.

She tells me a story about studying the Qur’an for hours and hours. She tells me a story about getting lost, once, in the grocery store. She tells me a story about learning to drive-- or starting to learn-- and then deciding that it’s just too stressful-- can’t she just book a car anywhere she needs to go, or can’t she just have anything delivered? She tells me a story about running back and forth in the street with her sisters. She tells me a story about kicking a soccer ball. She tells me a story about riding bicycles. She tells me a story about finding kites. She tells me a story about finding a baby bird. She tells me a story about the family cat. She tells me a story about all of these stories, after the war will have been over-- she isn’t sure which ones have happened, already, or yet. She tells me a story about cooking in the morning. She tells me a story about folding the bedsheets. She tells me a story about hopping around in the pillowcases.