This book contains five stories whose vastly different worlds and protagonists’ journeys seemed to be routine, ordinary, expected to start, pass, and end without scars or pain, only to surprise them with their burdens, sadness, and hardship as they groan under their weight, memories, prohibitions, and restrictions.

Is any of us truly free to live, choose, rejoice, and travel freely except with our dreams, thoughts, and wishes? Or will days reveal, without warning or anticipation, that we are prisoners of the imposed, which we did not choose and must tame—our days and ourselves—to reach the shores of safety as we think and hope? Choice, fate, destiny, freedom, responsibility, failure, success—these meanings and more deeply shaped the journeys of the five stories’ heroes. Their sharp edges carved the contours and shapes of their journeys we will live with them… Salim, son of Haj Abu Hassan and his pain; Basel and his poem he never found; Youssef, Nabil, Nafis, and their large family; Zein, Nabil, Uncle Safi, and the company of defeat and victory; Osama and his sad story with his old clothes— all this and more we will live with in the book and its five stories.