#69 This is what I will tell my children

if the day ever comes, we will reclaim all that was once ours.

I count seven forest green uniforms as I queue to board the flight.

One’s hand is resting, perennially, on his handgun - another is walking a straight line, parallel from ours, almost absentmindedly but not quite.

He seems to be looking for something other than the insignia on his shoulder. He doesn’t seem to be interested in finding drugs amongst these passengers. That is most likely because there are none at all, and he knows this.

I count again, and two more suddenly appear. Then four of them stand, a few meters between them, in a straight line; the sheep keep walking, lulling from side to side almost comfortably. They keep asking questions about my final destination as if they were ever in the power to guard anything but my safety - even though it has felt as everything but that for as long as I can remember.

The car is coming to a brief pause as my mother draws our front windows down. A guard peeks at her briefly, his face emotionless, an automatic rifle by his side. We are among mountains and cliffs, valleys and roads surrounding us, nothing more than them and the four people in this car.

Even if I don’t want to, I suddenly feel small.

My mother is defiant even in the way that she stares. You don’t know for sure, but you can just tell; she would move these mountains and destroy these pavements millions of cars pass through to protect her own.

What a different world these two figures inhabit: the mother, her fight to survive, the military green badge, their permission to kill.

When I have children one day I will not tell them about the humiliation of the tinted windows behind the airport security checkpoints. How the physical separation from those who have nurtured you hurts less than the darkened panes of glass. How you will be asked the same questions, over and over, by forest green suited badges that have no business in knowing about you, but their thirst for power over you - intimidation - will bend you to answer all of them.

I will tell them about the million hues of brown and green and yellow, almost blended to perfection in the mountains, bigger than anything I have ever seen. Even buildings and planes and entire fleets of ships cannot compare to this.

I will tell them about the Sun, how it seems to burn in the sweetest way. How hard I pressed my skin against my window seat in the plane: how badly I wanted to feel its warmth, even as it was slipping away.

I will tell them of the sky, how not a single cloud ever hung above us. How warm and blue and endless it seemed to stretch, as if the mountains ended where it began, or began where it had ended. And how for once, it didn’t bother me to not know.

I will tell them about the grass, about the forest, about the waterfalls. About how I took baths there and left cleaner than I had felt in my entire life. I will tell them about the heat, how it enveloped me and sometimes was suffocating, but how a slight breeze could balance the waves of warmth like nothing else did.

I will tell them about how vast and endless the landscape looked, no matter which direction you stood from. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere; there was land, there was sky, there was immensity.

I will tell them about the white hot sand, how it seeped into my toes and clothes and I did not care. How the water would carry me over the shore, algae and shells and hair, the temperature never cold, the waves never hard, the tide never biting.

I will tell them about the rivers and roads cutting through entire state lines. How beautiful the rocks glimmered under the sun and how badly I wanted to stop and feel them under my feet, how precious the streams drew and drew and drew more water down the shore, always unrelenting, smoothening every surface lucky enough to be touched by it.

When I have children one day I will tell them about what once was mine. Once the land that carried me, that nestled me deep in its warm hands. I will tell them that it is not mine anymore not so much by choice but by transformation: suddenly the mountains are menacing corners for violence caused by those who once swore to protect me. The darkness of the sky welcomes dangers you do not want to find. The beach is no longer mine: gunshots have tainted the white sand with blood too many times.

I have had to give it all up. And I will tell them that so did millions of small glass souls: they have all walked the same ground as me and have sacrificed those dark tinted glass doors because they know, they cannot raise a future in a land that does not want them any more.

I have had to let it go. And I will tell them that so did thousands of people just like me: young and hopeful, who had to learn to be graceful in their goodbyes, because they have had to say them so many times.

I will tell them how hard it was to silently agree to be remembered, for years, in airport departure halls. How migration tries, incessantly, to remind you that this is not your land. To strip you of equal treatment because you were not born in it. How you will have to work ten times harder than the person beside you because when you signed those papers, you signed a contract to keep going: to find your place in the world, because you felt that the land you once came from did not want you any more.

But First

I will tell them about the yellow bright trees in the sides of the road, how they wasted their color on the sidewalk below. I will tell them about how beautiful every sunrise was, drowning you in every possible hue of orange, how different it all looks under the wet pavement once the rains have swept everything clean.

I will tell them that wherever you go you will feel as part of the Earth as it is part of you. That this is the same land that so many others before you once came to, looking for a place to belong.

And I will tell them that if the day ever comes, we will reclaim all that was once ours.