If this were happening to anybody else, they’d have all these questions. But not me. I know exactly why this is happening to me. Same reason we ain’t get the whoop-dee-whoop from those Bloods. Same reason I ain’t never been shot. And you gotta know this before I eat this letter and send it to you.
I’m special. They ain’t gon kill me here. They can’t.
Quincy—
I think I know what you speak of. That feeling that you are special. That Allah has wrapped His blanket over your shoulders. I saw it once. Outside. In Gaza. It is hard to imagine Gaza City if you have not already been there. Everything is close. We live on top of each other. There is garbage in the streets and it is tough to escape the smell even if you go all the way to the sea. And when you’re young and you get to the sea, you might think you’ve found a moment of freedom, of peace. But there are Israeli ships in the distance—you learn to notice them from an early age—and there are people arrayed on the water to shoot you if you go too far out.
That happened to some fishermen I knew. The tide was receding and it had been a bad day for them. Everywhere they went, the fish fled. As quiet as they tried to be, as much as they’d tried to still themselves, to vanish and be like the air around them and the sea beneath them, they were always too clumsy. Their bodies would get in the way of their mission. So, frustrated, their boat kept moving further and further away from shore. Normally, it is an easy thing to keep track of. You don’t need the buoys, you just learn early on, first from your parents, then from your friends who disobey and are punished, until the lesson lives in your bones. But some days, if you haven’t caught the fish you need to cook to feed your family for that night and if you’ve had several days like this now that build up and cloud your mind and bring fog between your ears and behind your eyes, sometimes you forget the lessons in your bones and you drift far out and you don’t even hear the gunshot.
Your friend collapses. Their legs just fold beneath them. And a part of you is angry that they’ve fallen so gracelessly, because maybe some of your supplies have now slipped into the water and these are things that you paid very hard and dear money for that you will now never have back. And maybe you’re angry because your friend falling the way they did threatens to capsize your boat, tossing you all overboard. And the water is clean enough to swim in if you needed to, but then it would be easy for the snipers to say you and the others abandoned your boat simply to swim further out, as though that were a thing we would ever want to do.
Your friend doesn’t capsize the boat. You don’t tilt over. But you know from the way that red blossoms on their chest that they’re dead. A sniper has shot them.
But that’s not what I was talking about when I said I knew what you meant. There was one time, by a border crossing with Israel, several of us were protesting. It is often a family affair. People bring their instruments and we have signs and, because so many of us live together, we make the trip together.
We get to the beaches and there they are waiting for us. Soldiers. Some of them sit in armored personnel carriers and other huge vehicles. They have put up towers from whence they can snipe us. And soon, after a few warnings in Hebrew, they fire the first tear gas canisters at us. And the smoke, thick and white, swells towards us. The wind did not like us that morning and swept the tear gas right in our direction and soon we were all choking and crying out for milk.
It looked as though we would end our march as soon as we began. But then wind came and whisked the tear gas away. Someone had set fires nearby, or maybe the soldiers had shot at our electricity generators, setting them on fire, but large columns of black smoke seemed to rumble along the horizon on the beach. They made a sort of fence, as though this portion of beach were all that was left of Gaza.
And I look, as the tear gas clears away and a friend is pouring milk on my face and my eyes to stop the burning, and there, in the center of the fence, with smoke billowing around her, is my sister in her denim overalls. She’s with several of her friends. All of them wear keffiyeh around their necks. And in their hands are strings of beads, and they swing them as they dance the dabke.
It is a joyful thing to watch the dabke. It is danced at weddings and other joyous occasions. It is a sort of line dance, led by one person in particular who is supposed to be like a tree but with legs that stomp into the ground like roots, and arms that wave like tree branches caught in autumn wind. There’s chanting and the leader drives all of it, kicking and hopping and flaring their legs and skipping and spinning. And there is my sister, kicking and hopping and skipping and spinning, and she twirls her string of beads and leads the chanting. She is a warrior, the bravest thing I have ever seen.
Then I hear the thwip sound that rubber bullets make when they buzz by you. Sometimes they make a crackling sound when they hit rock or a thudding sound when they hit your chest or your stomach or your shoulder. But around her, all there is is thwip thwip thwip. As though she is dancing around them. As though she is dancing through them.
Do you think it ever stops? The protection? The thing that kept bullets from hitting you and that shielded her that day? Do you think a day comes when you wake up and suddenly you’re no longer protected? Do you even know it? What would it feel like?
Would it feel like going to sleep, thinking that you can control what you see and hear and think in this nightmare, and hoping that you might finally wake up somewhere familiar where you are loved, somewhere filled with the sweet smell of kanafeh, somewhere busy with the voices of your siblings and your cousins, where everyone is alive and loud and happy to see you…then waking up to see that nothing has changed?
You are still here. In this cell. Alone. So alone that the magic of this letter, which I will eat and chew up and swallow and which I will somehow pass to you, feels hollow. Morning comes when I wake up and chastise myself for having spent so much time talking to a ghost.
Please write me back.
Even if you aren’t real.
Omar—
I’m real, bro. I’m here. And whatever it is that’s going on, it’s real too. And if it ain’t, then that means we got the same dream going on at the same time, and that’s gotta be its own type of magic.
But, bro, so much of this is mental, you feel me? It’s like say I’m a ballplayer in the NBA and my pops manages me and he says I’m better than everybody. You ask him, “is your son better than Steph Curry?” and Dad’s like “he could be.” “Is your son better than LeBron?” “Well, he could be.” And you know for a fact that all those kids that play ball in college maybe 50 percent of them make it to the League, so it’s all mental. Mad people got talent and can learn skills and all that, but to get to the next level, yo? You need to be gassed up. Let me find out my dad’s gettin asked if I’m better than people and he’s like “oh man I don’t know.” Get outta here, for real? You my dad and you not gonna call me the best ballplayer that ever lived? But I hope you get what I’m tryna say.