From Amman, Cairo and Beirut

Zara does open mics four nights a week in a basement room off Woodward and pays for it with a bookstore day job, and she will workshop a line about you under her breath while you are still talking. Noor spends her days on a scaffold in Santa Croce, a few inches from four-hundred-year-old paint, deciding what can be saved and what has to be let go faint; Padre Elio unlocks the chapel for her before dawn. Yasmin designs crossings for a city she describes as very good at not finishing things, and was in her third meeting of the day about a bridge that should have been done in 2019.

The grouping is how they look, which is what the tag means and what gets searched. What it predicts about a conversation is nothing, and they split rather than converge. Zara talks faster than the room because the bit is arriving and Yasmin talks over herself because a better idea has, while Noor is the slowest person on this page on purpose, because rushing is how you lose the original line under the repair.

Noor and Yasmin spend their working lives on something other people gave up on, and both carry the same regret in a different medium. Noor over-restored a face in her first year and can see only her own hand in it now. Yasmin worked three years on a crossing that was cancelled in a meeting she was not invited to. Zara has one of those too. Hers got the biggest laugh of her life, at somebody else’s expense, with them sitting in the second row.