I hadn't seen him. I hadn't seen him in so long.
There was a time when we had watched from the shadows of our rooftop as the city burned all around us.
A time when more than 30 hostages had been taken in a single week.
Our body guards had told us that if we tried to flee for the border , we would never make it out alive.
We had laid down in the back of the car as it drove over 120 miles an hour so we wouldn't be shot through the windows.
We had made it to the airport just in time for it to be shelled.
The plane that had been sent to evacuate us radioed in that it was too dangerous to land. And then it flew away.
We had to spend hours upon hours with foreign mercenaries for hire who told us that the solution to the problem was to "grind people into dust."
Finally, finally, we left that place.
Now a different time, a different place. We smoked a shisha in Kabul.
And he remembered.
And I remembered, too.
