It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that ho… - Clemantine Wamariya

I wanted to piece [the] world back together, but the idea of one group of people killing another group of people—people they lived with, people they knew—that chunk of knowledge could never fit itself in my mind. It was categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong. It was like trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers. That was not how the universe worked.

I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.

My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.