A sense of place loss compounds personal romantic betrayal

Evidence

IN BROOKLYN everything was smaller. The stores were smaller, the apartments were smaller, the cars were smaller, even the shopping carts were smaller. Lina, her sister, and their dad moved into a drab concrete building in Bay Ridge peopled with other federal corrections staff. Even though she’d pushed for the move, Lina had wanted to go to Maryland. She knew no one in Brooklyn, and soon after the move she discovered that Zaki was cheating on her. She took a bus across the country to confront him with his infidelity, and their relationship ended abruptly, like a car slamming into a wall. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 647

Categorization

• XREF: The author’s geographic shorthand (‘everything smaller’ in Brooklyn) echoes the craft of conveying displacement through sensory detail — similar to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake treatment of place dislocation.