My distant cousin David sent me photos from the album, following our conversation about the village, the memories, and his connection to the head of the village, Mohammad Boukzah. Gently, he pulled out the photos that over time had stuck to the plastic cover of the envelope in the album, and placed them on the marble surface in the kitchen. These are photos he took during his visit to the village twenty years ago, a time when people from the village he knew in his childhood were still alive. How did I not know about this? I thought there were no more pieces of memory to collect, such traces of memory or testimony to the friendships and coexistence between the people who remained in the village and our displaced community? Each photo contains a great charge that for now is confined within the boundaries of the photo, mediated through the lens of the mobile phone camera, resting on the stone I know. Here is the cemetery that appears to be a seemingly innocent field, scattered stones with a memory engraving, and a mark indicating the location of the graves.

The cemetery is at the mercy of the river that tends to wash the area with strong rain currents, and the tombstones made of rocks have begun to roll and detach from the burial site. In dry seasons, the stream turns into a grazing field, and sometimes a liminal passage between the Jewish Melah and the village center. In these photos, my cousin David reunites with his friends from the village. "How did it feel to meet them after so many years?" I ask. David begins his answer with great sorrow and pain before the overwhelming joy. "Why?" I ask. "Because when I met them for the first time, I deeply felt the trauma of uprooting, the loss of connection to a place I had not forgotten, and perhaps I wondered if they had forgotten me? And we met, and with all the sadness, I felt a kind of repair.