She Read Lonergan in a Refugee Camp

The house lights had just dropped at Campfire Thursday: tattooed rust-belt dreamers nursing beer bottles and late-night regret, but nobody was going home.

The final comic bombed. Something about driverless cars and dating apps. His mic cut off mid-punchline, but no one complained.

Laughter lingered on the patio: brittle, habitual.

At the bar, a woman in a hoodie lit a cigarette with her eyes closed and muttered, "I miss when mistakes were human." Then she downed a shot like it was court-ordered.

I sat two tables back, eyes on nothing, a copy of Insight open like a secret I’d already overheard.

Beside it, an Irish Flapjack , black coffee, maple, whiskey , cooled in the dark.

It tasted like a question left cooling on the edge of memory.

Above me, a taxidermied grizzly bear hung mid-roar: rage preserved in dust and glass eyes. It stared like a final judge.

That’s when she arrived.

She moved through the crowd like she belonged to a different gravity. Late twenties or maybe early thirties, with a posture sharpened by survival. Not dressed to be noticed, but you noticed her anyway. She stopped at my table.

"Mind if I sit here?" she said it like a dare.

"Only if you’re okay with cynics," I replied.

Her laugh was softer than I expected, the kind that made you want to hear it again, if only to know it wasn't a fluke.

"I brought no hope. I bought this." She gestured to my drink.

"Irish Flapjack," I said. "Want one?"

"Make it black," she said. "I’ve seen enough sugar."

She introduced herself as Aya, from Mosul.

I asked nothing. She offered just enough.

"I used to be an English tutor," she said. "Then ISIS took our lectures. Said we read too much."

Her eyes settled on my book.

"Lonergan?" she asked.

"Survival reading," I replied.

"Same," she nodded. "The pure desire to know… it kept me alive. In some places, questions are contraband."

She didn’t say it like someone trying to impress me. She said it like she was remembering a name she hadn’t spoken in years.

"I read it in a refugee camp outside Amman. ISIS had taken Mosul University. They said knowledge was forbidden unless it praised bombs and threats."

She paused, eyes far off.

"I memorized what I could. It was sacred that way. Like scripture. I’d recite paragraphs under my breath when I couldn’t sleep, just to remember I was more than what they left behind."

There was smoke in the air the night they came, she told me. The sky smelled like cloves and fear. She hid with her cousin in a closet. Her aunt whispered, "They’ll teach you new rules." But Aya already knew: those rules meant no rules.

She remembered the quiet after: the footsteps, the burned books, the silence where futures used to be.

"There were questions we weren’t allowed to ask. Like: Where did my students go? Why are the desks still warm but the names already fading?"

I took a long sip. Something in my chest shifted.

When I was eleven, my dad took me to a UT lecture. It was late; the auditorium smelled like vinyl and old textbooks. The professor asked, "Why argue?" My dad leaned in and whispered, "Because answers hide in the arguing." I wrote those words in my pocket notebook and pressed so hard the pen bled through.

We sat in silence for a while. Then a man appeared: Conner.

He didn’t sit. Just leaned near. Tall. Old army jacket. Hands like maps. His presence didn’t ask permission.

"You two sound like you’re waiting for something," he said.

"Truth," Aya replied.

"Closure," I added.

Conner gave a crooked smile. "You’re looking for proof. That’s the slowest kind of faith."

"What’s left, then?" she asked.

"Rhythm," he said. "The nerve you follow when light isn’t promised."

It wasn’t poetry. It was a diagnosis.

Aya’s eyes went low. "My students… they disappeared. One day, eight empty desks. No bodies. Just absence."

Her hands trembled as she spoke. "Sometimes I dream I’m still calling roll. But I never get past the names that aren’t answered."

Conner didn’t flinch. He just nodded, then pulled a ragged piece of paper from his coat and handed it to her.

"For the asking," he said, then walked off like he’d never been there.

Under the soft lamplight, Aya unfolded the note:

We don’t need to prove the sun will rise.

We just need to want it to.

Asking is what keeps the light coming.

She read it twice, then folded it smaller: not to hide it, but to carry it.

By 2:15 a.m., the chairs were stacked, the espresso machine quiet, and only the grizzly bear kept watch.

"I’m tired of feeling unfinished," Aya whispered.

I placed a hand on her shoulder. "So am I."

She nodded slowly. A shift, barely visible but felt.

"Then let’s walk while it’s still dark."

We stepped outside.

No answers. No maps. No dawn in sight.

But the question was enough to move us.

We didn’t move because of faith, or hope, or reason.

We moved because the question didn’t let us stay still.