time is like an accordion. sometimes it stretches, sometimes it’s all squeezed up.

i wrote a version of that in a post a thousand lifetimes ago and made my students read it in spring 2020, when we’d all moved online and i didn’t know what to teach them beyond, apparently, the fact that time is weird and the moments fold back on one another and we try to navigate them as best we can.

that’s the summation of all of my work: time is weird.

when i die, they’ll write: “single lady writer dies, thought time was an accordion.”

you’re welcome.

***

Hamza Wael Ahmed Al-Astal | Ali Muhammad Zakaria Al-Astal | Sarah Bilal Muhammad Hassouna | Adam Hossam Amin Hassouna | Sarah Firas Fahmy Al-Najjar

***

my parents married on 27 december 1975.

she wore a wedding dress that we later sold on etsy to a lovely woman who wore it for her lovely wedding. my father wore a tuxedo with a ruffled blouse. (lies! i look at the photos and see he did not.)

great-grandmother wore a dress that a great aunt had famously picked up on the way to town. my grandfather had a goatee. burvil– my mom’s mom, love of my life–, i don’t remember for some reason. (not that i was there; i mean, from pictures– i have no memory of her pictorially speaking.)

my aunt wore a peach polyester maxi dress with ivory lace ruffles. vair vair 70s.

***

Karim Muhammad Abdel Aziz Tamraz | Muhammad Ahmed Shukri Hammad | Imad Saleh Maher Farwaneh | Muhammad Bilal Muhammad Abu Al-Amrain | Ahmed Mahmoud Ahmed Tabasi | Yazan Moaz Hammad Hammad | Shaaban Ahmed Shaaban Halasa | Aysel Hamdi Hikmet Ghaben | Maryam Abdel Aziz Omar Farwaneh

***

for much of the 1980s, this dress my aunt wore as a bridesmaid in my parents wedding served as a costume whenever i staged, in my bedroom at my grandmother’s house, the plays i’d written for myself. plays heavily influenced by the 1980s bbc production of pride and prejudice, our elementary school reading of johnny tremain, and the various heroines of the sunfire romance series.

which is to say plays rich in disaster, empire waists, and tubercular romance.

this is your regular reminder that i never know where we’re going when i start to write these things. just that we will wind up somewhere. the words will take us somewhere.

i feel like i tell my students this too often.

i feel like i tell them everything too often because, year on year, my advice doesn’t necessarily change and, year on year, i repeat it four times per day. and so i imagine they are tired of hearing it.

when the truth is maybe i am tired of hearing it.

***

Elaine Osama Muhammad Dabour | Hour Muhannad Abdul Qader Al-Attar | Maryam Mahdi Ashraf Barghouth | Ahmed Raed Nabil Farhat | Amjad Khaled Kamal Rashwan | Zein al-Din Anwar Musa Jaber | Lina Mahmoud Muhammad Qanan

***

but then also i think maybe we can never say things enough. there is never time or space enough to say all that needs to be said.

and, anyway, the work of writing across a life is surely the work of running one’s mind across the same ideas, over and over, like a comb through hair.

sometimes it glides through. others it catches on tangles. still others, unbeknownst to you, you’re electric, and the hair sizzles, springing away of its own volition, tethered like a kite but flying, free.

***

the children of gaza hold the world record for the number of kites flown simultaneously.

i misremembered it as balloons and couldn’t get that image out of my head and so did a whole painting of balloons, only to fact check myself and re-remember that it was kites.

the painting is comprised of blobs where the kites in the photographs are more straight lines.

***

time is an accordion, sometimes it stretches, at others it thins.

time is balloons, blots on the horizon, and also kites, em-dashing the sky.

***

Anas Muhammad Fahmy Al-Najjar | Omar Ahmed Nawaf Al-Najjar | Sanad Salah al-Din Hamdan al-Najjar | Hanzada Ahmed Mahmoud Al-Masry | Sham Rabie Jumah Abu Jazar | Milana Ayman Samir Moussa

***

***

when i used to fly late nights from chicago into memphis, the fedex planes would be lined up waiting to land, strung up across the horizon like fairy lights.

a few weeks ago, plagued by a feeling one of my team of therapists identified as anger but which i later recognized as grief, i went down to my favorite dc place, the dc war memorial, and watched the planes coming into DCA.

there’d be a light in the west, between me and the lincoln memorial, then a plane would land, and there’d be blackness. then another light, then a plane would land, and blackness.

then another light, and blackness, and another light, and blackness, and another and another and another.

over and over, there was a light in the blackness. on and on.

***

commercial travel out of gaza international airport was prohibited in february 2001. airport staff continued to staff the ticket counters and baggage for several years.

***

Muhammad Fadi Dhiyab Musa | Muhammad Adel Muhammad Musa | Aisha Salah Al-Din Ismail Abu Shammala | Lara Ahmed Samir Abu Shammala | Dalal Majid Ismail Abu Shammala | Musab Mahmoud Nayef Abu Shammala | Beirut Muhammad Iyad Abu Shammala

***

on the morning of 27 december 2023, i woke up at 5:49 am, went to my parents’ hotel and saw them off in a cab to the airport, back to memphis.

in the evening of 27 december 1984, i’m not really sure. except that she was three. in my own memory, for some reason, i age myself up, tell myself i was four. i wasn’t. we were, both of us, three.

i’m a 40 year old woman with my head in my mother’s lap as, in january 2022, she recounts how my friend was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor on the 4th of july 1984 and died on that 27 december, my parents’ 9th wedding anniversary. 

the police weren’t supposed to come. according to my mother, they’d worked it all out with the doctors beforehand and the police were not supposed to come, but they did. my mother remembers the flashing lights of their cars. 

i wonder if i lay awake that night, aware that something had happened even though i do not know it. the red and blue lights bouncing across the walls, like fairies in the dark. i wonder, but i do not remember.

***

Samira Muhammad Omar Hegazy | Roaa Salah al-Din Muhammad al-Dalu | Yazan Ramez Muhammad Qashta | Mirna Ali Mahmoud Qeshta | Souad Mohamed Mohamed Gouda | Muhammad Abdullah Ibrahim Gouda | Amani Muhammad Abd al-Rahim al-Madhoun | Qusay Muhammad Alaa Al-Din Ahmed

***

i remember mostly pictures of myself.

but also, i remember, deep within my bones, earlier that year, when all of the adults stood weeping and wailing, receding from my view as i was wheeled away to have my tonsils taken out.  

they took you away before we were ready, debo tells me years later. and, hearing her say this, what i felt was that i might throw up. 

we didn’t realize they were going to take you away yet, we thought we would get to go with you. we all cried, because they just took you away from us, and it was just an orderly so maybe we could have stopped it but we didn’t know.

you were just gone, debo tells me. 

paw-paw and gran and me, we were all crying and they just took you away from us. 

hearing her say this sometime in 2021, what i heard was the screams of my younger self. what i felt in my guts was those screams escaping my body. 

***

Islam Sameh Hani Al-Madhoun | Omar Khamis Sidqi Al-Madhoun | Lynn Saeed Mahmoud Al-Madhoun | Bilal Ahmed Khalil Zorob | Ahmed Amjad Majed Abu Odeh | Ibtisam Noman Suleiman Haboush | Muhammad Mahmoud Youssef Al-Hassi

***

i’ve been thinking for months now about the inner lives of children: what it is to be a child, how it feels to be a child, and how one might write that.

i do not remember what it is. i do not remember how it felt. i do not have the words to write it.

it feels both physically and intellectually painful to acknowledge how vulnerable children are. both as an adult and as someone who was once a child.

***

Hala Raed Ibrahim Al-Sawalhi | Youssef Fathi Suleiman Al-Jarjawi | Ahmed Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Sawalhi | Zaid Ahmed Jihad Abu Jabbara | Rand Sameh Muhammad Abu Khousa | Abdullah Abdul Rahman Abdul Karim Al-Salak | Yasser Ahmed Abu Halhoul | Ethal Qais Abdul Karim Al-Zahrani | Yaman Muhammad Ahmed Al-Ashqar | Fayez Mahmoud Fayez Ahl

***

i’m in brooklyn, with a friend, who i first met last spring when the amtrak we were on hit a human being.

they ask why i’m writing about christa mcauliffe and i say the idea of the story stuck with me, and i felt that this is a story that i could put myself into and get something back from as well.

at least an hour later, after the sun has gone down and chill and dark begin to set in, they ask another question: what would you write if it were only for yourself? and i give the fuller answer of why i want to write about christa.

because, if it were only for me, i would write the biography of a child who died at the age of three.

the academic answer to why i want to do this is because we do not take seriously the lives and emotions of children.

in biography, childhood is usually a list of ancestors and a couple of characterizing anecdotes. if it delves into psychology, it does so to explain the person’s future life. i avoided childhood so hard in the jackie book that it barely even factors in.

but childhood matters. independent of whatever does and does not happen to us later, the life of a child ripples out exponentially.

***

the human answer for why i want to do this is because i feel it in my bones, how much her life has mattered to me, how much the life and loss of a child matter. it slips into cracks, leaves blown out holes.

all loss goes with you. you take it with you (and by you, i clearly mean you, but i also clearly mean i, ) in ways you may not even know, so deeply is it embedded into the texture of how you exist, how you live, how you love. the person who left, the person who got thirty-one-years with us, three years with us or six months or was miscarried, the person who left you, the person you are left to be as a result.

you take it with you, all of it, into a future in which they no longer exist. a future in which, maybe, you feel you never quite fit, because they are not there with you in it and all you did was have the luck of living next door and it not being you who was the three-year-old who died.  

***

Gazal Jamel Moein Atallah | Riad Muhammad Riad Totah | Majd Muhammad Hamdan Totah | Hala Muhammad Younis Al-Agha | Aisha Omar Mustafa Shehab

***

so many children have been murdered in gaza.

i don’t want to attach a specific number because by the time i finish writing this, that number will be out of date. by the time you read this, whenever this piece of writing finds you, who even knows where we’ll be.

i do not have words, just names.

***

Karim Tariq Abdul Hakim Al-Mutawq | Sham Marwan Abdel Hakim Al-Mutawq | Maryam Abdel Rahman Maher Al-Mutawaq | Enas Khabbab Muhammad Nabil Al-Mutawq | Salah Ahmed Salah Al-Ajrami | Jinan Ammar Youssef Abu Muayliq | Ahmed Mohamed Abdel Hamid Ashour | Khalil Abdullah Abu Hayya | Abdel Hamid Mohamed Abdel Hamid Ashour | Elaine Amjad Alian Abu Ayada | Hamza Muhammad Nahed Al-Fasih | Omar Muhammad Khalil Abu Hamad | Fadi Khaled Muhammad Al-Bardawil | Sham Hussein Muhammad Abu Hamad | Muhammad Moataz Obaid Yassin | Amir Muhammad Jumah Dhahir | Sabah Mahmoud Jamil Al-Khatib | Noura Ahmed Deeb Radwan | Adam Nader Harby Al-Helou | Ahmed Basil Ramadan Abed | Hamza Rami Nidal Aliwa | Menat Allah Maher Khaled Abu Obaid | Sham Mahmoud Nasr al-Din Abu Nimah | Omar Jamil Al-Zaanin | Khaled Yahya Khaled Abu Hilal | Judy Abdullah Dunian Mansour | Maria Muhammad Arafat Al-Bahtini | Majd Mohamed Ismail Salah | Maryam Ahmed Abdel Raouf Al-Halabi | Khaled Ahmed Bashir Shamlakh | Anas Muhannad Sami Aslim | Ezz El-Din Saeed Nabil Al-Laham | Muhammad Rajab Muhammad Al-Naqib | Raghad Hani Khaled Abu Al-Naga | Youssef Hammam Mustafa Abu Toha | Zain Ziyad Ahmed Al-Muqayd | Judy Asaad Maher Abu Lashin | Ghaith Khaled Radwan Shabat | Hour Hossam Fawzi Al-Bawab | Abdul Rahman Ahmed Essam Shaat | Hello Hassan Fawzi Al-Bawab | Maryam Wael Abdel Rahman Al-Khudari | Ali Ismail Mahmoud Al-Derawi | Mahmoud Muhammad Mahmoud Al-Derawi | Hana Moamen Mahmoud Al-Talaa | Aseel Muhammad Mazen Shaldan | Jude Abdel Halim Ezzat Abdel Latif | Kenan Ashraf Tayseer Al-Herbawi | Gazal Imad al-Din Ismail Abu al-Qumsan | Ahmed Raafat Mahmoud Al-Zein | Nasser Khamis Nasser Al-Tahrawi | Alma Taha Amer Al-Majayda | Wissam Abdel Hadi Adel Daher | Sarah Saeed Jaber Abu Huwaishil | Sanad Saqr Izzat Abu Rukba | Karim Karam Muhammad Bakr | Uday Ahmed Muhammad Al-Aleel | Nagham Refaat Omar Abu Shab | Mirna Ahmed Louay Al-Minawi | Maryam Maher Salah Othman | Sham Khalil Abdul Hafez Al-Baghdadi | Diala Rani Mahmoud Muammar | Amina Muhammad Salem Al Nabih | Khaled Abdullah Waheed Al-Tabash | Mahmoud Fahd Mahmoud Bashir | Malik Hisham Musa El-Zanati | Ibrahim Nael Bashir Al-Rahn | Zaid Amer Akram Murtaja | Messk AL Khitam Ismail Awad Weshah | Reda Muawiyah Ahmed Khalla | Malak Ismail Rabih Habboub | Haya Ahmed Saleh Hamed | Laila Saeed Atta Abu Safra | Hassan Hani Hassan bin Saeed | Mahmoud Ismail Harzallah | Amir Saeed Atta Abu Safra | Sham Ahmed Shamekh Jarad | Bassam Sameh Muhammad Al-Sankari | Essam Ihab Muhammad Abu Youssef | Amira Muhammad Salim Al-Sawarka | Saif Al-Din Saleh Abdullah Al-Arqan | Ayman Mahmoud Ayman Al-Jayeh | Judy Muhammad Asaad Abu Shawqa | Muhammad Yasser Rafiq Abu Habib | Lana Muhammad Nasser Al-Samri | Ahmed Mohamed Abdel Rahim Haider | Momen Aymen Al Jaraah | Muhammad Raafat Saleh Shalouf | Ali Muhammad Ali Al-Mubayed

***

three full years equates to 1,096 days.

***

it has been three full months, since this stage of israel’s long effort to rid palestinian land and the earth of all palestinian people began.

***

when we start writing, it is ok if we don’t know where we’re going. because in life we don’t know where we’re going. we just move forward with all our templates and ideas and glued together hopes and dreams.

i tell my students this over and over, i say it 4 times over every day i say it. it’s ok not to know. it’s ok if you’re writing to think, if writing is the way you think. if you can embrace that, release yourself into it, it may just be possible you’ll wind up somewhere you couldn’t even imagine at the start.

always, always, all i want is to wind up somewhere we couldn’t even imagine when we started. not in a bleak way, certainly not apocalyptically, but better. so much better than whatever we can dream.

i’m having a difficult time writing about christa’s hope, because i feel so little. i feel so little and also i feel so little. (i was three.) and yet…

in writing, it feels like there’s always hope, if only of transferring a feeling onto the page. because i struggle to feel in my body. in words, in paints, in pictures, that i can do. in my body, it’s just wounds and hyper-real, photo-based memories and trauma responses and exposed nerves.

but then, there are not words enough for this.

***

***

Muhammad Nidal Muhammad Saleh Dardouna | Kenan Muhammad Salim Nabhan | Muhammad Youssef Muhammad Abu Shawish | Muhammad Muhammad Basman Saqr | Ahmed Hamto Ahmed Al-Satri | Karim Hussein Akram Al-Malh | Muhammad Youssef Fayez Qasim | Bayan Medhat Abdel Fattah Dhaif | Lynn Abdel Rahman Ramadan

***

what does it feel like to be three? do you remember?

sit for a moment.

sit with that question and see what comes up.

do it now.

please.

***

Rima Ahmed Samir Qanita | Makram Mustafa Ibrahim Al-Latta | Mahmoud Rani Mahmoud Abu Saada | Nour El-Din Hamada Ahmed Jarghoun | Eileen Jihad Hamada Al-Bakri | Amer Bilal Hassan Al Tatar | Bisan Osama Salama Hussein Ali

***

i’ve been thinking about the inner lives of children and what the point of biography might be right now. i have ideas and memories and unpublishable pages.

and i do wonder: what if biography could get under the skin of that? of what it is to be three, of what it is to be a child? with feelings and experiences and concerns and interests and everything all new and big and still only tenuously connected to language.

what if biography could convey all that?

***

i asked you to sit with the memory of being a child, being three. did you do it? do you remember?

***

the slap of a hot car seat felt for the first time ever on one’s bare thighs, the vividness of the oranges at the easy way when your grandmother lifts one in her hand to check its ripeness, the cool of the air conditioner at naptime felt through the holes of the seldom-laundered communal class afghans, the fear and also excitement as the wind whips against your legs as you ride in your aunt’s Jeep that has no doors, the red and blue lights splashing against the dark of the bedroom walls, the wave of stillness that descends within you with the sound of fred rogers’s voice, the sizzle of the bug zapper outside as it catches its prey, the warmth that comes from your father’s attention and also the uneasiness you’ll later realize came from the sense that when your father looks at you it is usually through a camera’s lens, the slap of a hand against a shin then the squish of the mosquito’s last moment on earth, the smell of peanuts and cigars in your grandfather’s van and on his breath, the uncontrollable laughter that escapes you after you ask an adult who loves you to retell a story you already know so you can have this uncontrollable laugh you know you will have at the ending because you crave some sort of emotional release, the dark of the darkness, the depth of the aloneness when alone, the nightmarishness of the nightmares, the screaming when you are taken away, the terror when they leave you, the dog breathing beneath you as you release your whole weight onto him like a couch, the feeling of freshly cut grass between bare toes, the exquisite relief of wetting the bed and the subsequent flood of shame, the slap of the wind on your face as you scream HIGHER! HIGHER! and whatever adult who loves you and is standing behind you as you swing towards them presses their hands gently against your back again, propelling you into the clouded blue, as you scream HIGHER! HIGHER! ready to go back up into the heavens, even as you’re still gliding down to earth.  

***

from the river to the sea.

***

Note: at least 6,747 people were murdered during the first 19 days of the state of israel’s ongoing genocide of the palestinian people. the names appearing throughout this essay are the names of the children who, during those first 19 days, were martyred at the age of 3.