Swimming in the Dead Sea

It was a chilly, May evening. We were sitting in the front porch of Muna's house, wrapped up in shawls and jackets, yet stubbornly insisting on smoking the argila outside. Four bold women who did not take shit from anyone, not even the weather.

We'd all made a special effort to get together this night. Our friend, Rana, was visiting Toronto from Ramallah, and this was our only opportunity to see her. We smoked, drank Moroccan mint tea, and talked. We heard stories of Rana's new life in Palestine. She was so content. Said she felt at peace, at home. Neither Canada nor Lebanon were home, she said, they were just places where she had passed time.

We listened to her stories. Inhaling and exhaling our feelings of envy with every puff of the argila, hoping that the sweet taste of the strawberry tobacco would soothe that intense craving for home.

Then Rana told us about swimming in the Dead Sea. I have never been there, but as a child, I imagined it to be this magical experience; floating on water, absolutely weightless. As Rana was telling her story, I felt a growing urge to go to there. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to soak my skin in the salty waters of the Dead Sea. I wanted to float, and to have for a minute, a feeling of a peaceful nothingness.

There are places in Middle East painted with thousand of years of stories. There are places so breathtaking it hurts. Rana's presence was a reminder of their existence.

The sad truth is that many of us cannot go to those places freely, or cannot return to them, cannot see them again, or ever see them...

Many of those places now reek of destruction and suffering; even so many years of stories cannot hide the stench...

So I may never be able to swim in the Dead Sea, but I can write it in my stories and in my poems.

I will travel through words.
I will remember through words.
I will continue to paint home with my words.