I Wore My Regalia

I graduated yesterday.

Then, I wept on my way back home because I was never really at home.

The way back was silent and I saw my sister wiping some tears.

But it was dark, and the streets gave birth to no lights.

I thought that maybe this was my best chance at hiding the uncontrollable grief I had been dealing with as the car was sailing me away to a foreign land.

And yet, here I am, metaphor-less when it comes to writing about Palestine because I have nowhere to shelter me, no place for me to hide.

Not even words can yield me.

And I surrender to the coldness of the floor and hope for the sun to wash me away.

But it never does to a moonlit human frame.

She asks my tears why they are falling.

Because the curtains have been changed ten times since the last time they were seen.

I fall from grace and watch myself lean to an assailed sense of justice.

And I tell myself I should have had a rifle, a sword, an arrow.

Perhaps, the same one I watched was used to shoot my father by Israel in my dream when I was eleven.

With infatuation, I yearned to learn the control of the bow.

But I saw it being used against me.

I settle for the pen in my meticulous hands, as you see now.

And I wonder if it enough. But it is.

And I won’t even separate the doubt from the truth by a line.

I graduated yesterday.

And I told my parents, as I was shedding tears, that none of this mattered.

That three years of refined education and growth stands before Gaza and weeps.

I even remembered that I was wearing make up as my tears blurred the lines between my eyeliner and mascara and I felt foolish.

That there are people with blood-stained clothes whilst I am wearing my brightest, purest white.

I am completely metaphor-less when it comes to Palestine. I am unwashed away, awake, solid.

I am enraged, blood-thirsty.

An iconoclast.

I am merciless and vengeful.

And I love that about me.

There is no other way to be.

Without Palestine, I can never be.

No graduation can make me half the person I am without her.

I hope that for the next graduation, I come back home.

In tears again, weeping as I see the windows of my city salute me.