I guess what I’m tryna say is that you gotta keep your mental straight, you feel me? Becuz sometimes when that shit gets broke you can’t put it back together.
I seen some shit the other day, they was walkin me out of my cell for my hour of rec time in the yard, and on the way out, we passed by this other cell in solitary and there was a bunch of guards outside this one door and they had the door open and they were talkin all quiet and whispering and you could tell they was tryna frame someone or build a lie around whatever it was that had happened. And that’s when I seen the nigga foot like stickin out past the door. You can’t see all his body because of the way the guards are standing, but you can see some of it, and he’s lyin face-up on the floor, with his head and upper back propped up aginst something and there’s just that shiny stickiness ALL over the floor. It come back that he slit his wrists while he was in there, and you’re not supposed to be able to do that. They give you the suicide blanket for that reason, and it’s not even a blanket thing, it’s like this thing they just basically wrap you in and zip up to your neck. It’s like nylon or something and they basically trap you in it. You can’t mov for shit. And they call it a suicide blanket becuz you’re not supposed to be able to tear it open and make a noose like how you would normally do if you were gonna do yourself like that.
But I guess the guards thought that he was better. He looked like he could be about my age. I don’t know if I ever seen him around on the outside. He coulda been from any block really. But I’m glad it wasn’t me. Coulda been. He and I got the same setup. A bunk. A toilet. And a mesh window. There’s a slot they slide your food in and that’s how the roaches and all that get in to your cell and sometimes they make so much noise it gets hard to sleep. It don’t feel like you have company, tho. The Box could be fulla bugs, but you still feel alone.
Sometimes I cry and that helps. Not loud or nothin, but real quiet. You know the type where your shoulders heave and it feels like the sadness is tryna bust right outta your body. Just like that.
Dear Quincy—
I am sorry to hear about your fellow prisoner. May his soul be blessed. May Allah guide him. Suicide is sin here. But I know many who have taken their own lives, and I do not blame them.
There was a boy in our neighborhood, Mohanned. He was a writer. He was older than me; thus, we all looked up to him as an older brother. When he wrote, you could feel the despair that moved through him and see that it was the same despair that moved through the rest of us. By the time I was 7 years old, my home had been bombed by the Israelis three times. Three times our memories had been reduced to rubble. And three times we had to rebuild. For some, it was like starting from scratch. Like the whole of your life until that moment had been wiped away and was nothing more than broken stones and metal and dust. But some of us could still recover the toys we had played with or the shoes our parents had purchased for us when we were children.
Mohanned used to write and write and write. He would shut himself up in his room for entire days, just reading and writing. We all thought he was a sort of prophet and that he simply lived differently than the rest of us. He had a direct line to Allah that the rest of us could only hope one day to have. He would post his stories on Facebook, and as soon as they went online they would get hundreds of likes that would then turn to thousands of likes. We loved him. So when his mother found him in his room, no longer breathing, it was not just she who grieved. It was all of us. Then, on the heels of that grief was fear. Because he was suffering just like the rest of us. And now we knew that what took him could take us as well.
You see it sometimes in the way that we practically throw ourselves in front of their bullets. Everybody protests, no matter your age or whether you are a man or a woman. But often you will see the young boys in the buffer zone, and if you ask them, they would say that they didn’t care if they died. During the siege, we live without electricity, without running water, and without any sign that things will change. So hopelessness is logical. But we are taught to be stronger. There is always a family member or a member of someone else’s family who would feel a loss too great for you to ever want to inflict on them. And we have been suffering for over 70 years, so what is another month of this sort of life?
Even if I wanted to, there is nothing for me to do it with here. We had our blankets taken away when it was announced that several of the prisoners had begun a hunger strike. They are protesting their conditions. There is nothing in our cells to regulate the temperature. The food is crawling with insects. Occasionally, we are taken out and beaten for no reason. There is no interrogation, only the beating. And we are not given prayer mats for salat. All of this because I once threw a stone at a settler’s car.
But maybe I am safer in here than I am out there.
Still, I dream of the Rimal district and all of its leaves. It is like an oasis in this desert of misery. It is where the wealthy in Gaza congregate. It contains the Governor’s Palace and the Presidential Palace, but it also has the school for refugees, maintained by the UN. The Gaza Mall is there. But also there is coastline. Mohanned went there often to write. Also, foreigners who came to Gaza would bring books. And we would sometimes fight over them. They were portals to different worlds. And in them you could sometimes see yourself. Even though they were rarely about Arabs, and rarely about young Arab boys like me, if I squinted, I could see in the contours of their heroes something of my shoulders and my hair and my hands and feet. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself as the main character. And I was a hero who did not destroy things but saved them.
You are right. We are special. Because when I hear of other prisoners, I always feel as if their loneliness is bottomless. But, because I have you, that is not the case for me. We have this gift. And you give me courage.
I think I will join the hunger strike. It is an opportunity to build something. I do not see it as destroying my body. I see it as transcending it. I am preparing myself to live on a higher level of existence. I am flower petals being whisked on a breeze ever upward. Heroes take control of their destinies.
I will be a hero.
Dear Omar—
We heroes?
I like thinkin I’m a hero, but do kids like us get to be heroes? My homie got shot like 8 times over some bullshit and he ain’t stop no bullets. He still alive tho, so maybe he is. But like we just kids. We beef with other sets and stomp kids out and get stomped out and laugh and sometimes I go to Cee’s house to listen to the music he makin with Mac and them but I gotta leave the hammer in a locker cuz he don’t like guns in the studio and I can’t forget it on the way out cuz I have to cross the way to get back to Artesia and that’s Bloods over there.
There’s lots of empty houses in the hood, and when I was little, we didn’t think nothin of it. Maybe ghosts was in them, but couldn’t be nothin scarier than what was out on the streets. Still it was fun. We was havin fun. I mean, that’s Long Beach. Everybody from everywhere so really we don’t do that whole “where you from, cuh?” and all that stuff. But that’s the thing is like heroes gotta have origin stories, right? Like Superman is from Krypton, he some undocumented immigrant or whatever. And Batman’s from Gotham. Spider-Man’s from somewhere in New York or whatever. But Long Beach, do you even have history before you get to Long Beach? Our parents and grandparents, they came back from the wars way back when and it was like ownin a home was the most important thing in the world so they bought up all these houses and you get these families movin in but then the houses get foreclosed on and the government snatch them right back up and ain’t nobody livin in em no more so all you got is ghosts maybe. I don’t know why I’m so hung up on needin to know where heroes is from.