Squint and you can see more. Concentrate on a patch of blue into liquid mauve sky and there are little dots floating, small kites floating in the wind, from the rooftops under curfew.
We count 13, then 18, then, wait- look over there- 34, then almost 40. Cannot see colour or pattern- they are the same maybe as those kites mangled in the electric wires, flight gone wrong. Dropping the spool of string and running home, defeated by the black wires that hang.
Four years ago- leaving Bourj al Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon, full of the pain of refugees for 51 years then, the continued dispossession of now 54 years of life in muddled muddied alleyways, the longing-
Lying- telling my friends that I was going to the mountains in Lebanon, but then crossing into Syria, then Jordan, then to the bridge into Palestine. My stomach drops as we cross, and I lose myself in the large Israeli flag floating above a military outpost. Strange pain numbs my forehead and runs down to my neck as we drive past Israeli settlements, white empty wrong, orange organized and sterile. The more the tourists in my taxi laugh and plan their nights of clubbing in Tel Aviv, the more I shrink into the door of the taxi-
-always wondering if it opens and I fall to the ground-
Then almost into Jerusalem and we pass a Palestinian village- beautiful, disorganized, in place. And the little boy running with tattered shorts and a ripped browned t-shirt- being pulled by his kite as it launches, a kite of green white and black, with a red triangle arching into the sky.
