The family room becomes a battlefield without truce flags. One young woman who shared a bedroom with her sister after the sister had an affair with her fiancé described it: "We slept three feet apart. I fantasized about smothering her with a pillow every night for eight months. In the morning, we ate cereal at opposite ends of the table. The hate was the only thing we shared." In bomb shelters, refugee camps, or earthquake emergency housing, strangers are thrown together. Add pre-existing ethnic or sectarian hatred—Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis, Bosnian Serbs and Bosniaks, Israeli settlers and Palestinians—and the shelter becomes a powder keg.

Humanitarian workers report that in such settings, hate is temporarily suppressed by survival instinct, but emerges explosively the moment safety is restored. The obvious question: If you share a room with hate, why not simply leave?

One day, you will leave that room. You will walk out into air that is not shared. And when you do, the hate might follow you—or you might leave it behind, like an old piece of furniture, too heavy to carry into your next life.

However, I recognize the underlying, powerful human theme hidden within the garbled text: