The Touch Of Your Coat As You Trot On By.

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.

And I am content to keep hurting. I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing.

16 years old, five people around my table, two legs, and no bombs. I eat dinner with my family and we laugh at my dad dropping Qidreh on his chest. He looks at me with an embarrassed smile and I hand him a cloth to wipe himself with. 16 years old, one person around my table, one and a half legs, one bomb. My dad amputates my leg as I lay on the dinner table. He looks at me with anguish and I cry out to him as I feel every cut he makes. There is no anesthesia, there is no hospital for me to go to, my father the surgeon looks out of place operating in our family home. But my leg must come off, and the laughter of past dinners must quiet to allow for my screams. 16 years old, one leg, too many bombs to count. I clench my jaw to keep quiet as my father changes my leg’s dressing. He looks at me with apologetic eyes and I hand him a cloth to wipe my wound with. 16 years old, one leg, and one hope left: to make it to 17.

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.

If there is nothing worthwhile in me, how do I go forward from here? How do I live as a creature and not the woman I thought I was?

The girl I was and the woman I am reconcile in tides. Coursing warm waves and biting cold foam, dancing in circles. Becoming one another, and abandoning one’s self in permanence.

They say a burnt child loves the fire; a drowned woman, too, loves the sea. And even more so the siren that dragged her to the bottom of it.

The AI’s weakness, hands. The closer it gets to the tips of humanity’s fingers, our very identity, the more it fumbles and struggles to execute. As if it knows not that it cannot but that it should not paint for us while we toil in mundane repetitive tasks.

Man is turning itself into machine’s workhorse. Fools with knowledge become not wisemen, just more efficient fools.

I am tired of hiding. Of being embarrassed. Unsure. Reluctant. Ashamed. I am tired now, more than all of those things. And it’s a fatigue I love, the sort that kicks in to spare me misfortune, and only spare me misfortune, in an awfully painless way. After all isn’t that fatigues purpose, to stop us from continuing on and hurting ourselves.

When I think on 18, and the years that have passed since then, I realize how many little deaths I’ve had in my one life. How many versions of me had to abandon my flesh for ephemerality for me to exist, fettering away. Do they watch me, the way runner up pageant girls watch the winner be crowned with sparkling tears gliding down her cheeks to match her sparkling tiara? Do they envy me? Or do they watch in glum acceptance, the way a parent would as their child draws in spontaneous sharpie all over their orderly white walls. Do they think they know better? Worst of all, do they watch in horror, the way the drug addicted’s partner would as the one they love most spirals down deeper and darker paths? Do they pity me?

Do they think of me at all? How lonely it would be to exist in this world as only one version of me.