Owned houses and others are rented, fleeting and temporary dwellings, between which the writer moves across different Syrian cities, turning the houses into stations, or rest stops that allow her to contemplate the context of her life, her choices, and the source of her desire to remain between closed doors. The subjective nature of the book turns it into a kind of personal testimony, but Nour Abu Farraj is betting that her memories may intersect to a large degree with the experiences of middle-class young men and women from the 1980s generation in Syria, who lived a relatively stable life, before the war came and made a difference in their context. Forcibly expel them from their safe spaces.
In the face of the transience and uncertainty that war brings, description becomes a tribute to the fleeting; This is why the book tries to remind readers of the long time it takes to build a house, in the symbolic or structural sense, but it nonetheless warns them against becoming captives to the place, and encourages them to carry their homes as souvenirs, or small luggage on their long journey.
