The meditation on longing for home centers on an audio recording when my uncle Elias told us how our family fled from the bombing in 1948 in Jerusalem, Palestine, thinking they would return home in a week's Connecting the parallel solitudes of my uncles' sadness, and of my own regrets of not having spent more time with him, is a powerful poem by Palestinian poet Khalil Al-Sakakini, that my uncle and my father recited to me and my siblings during our childhood.