The engine's endless hum haunts me—twenty years and still it rattles my bones, screaming we don't belong. My chest aches with each vibration. Grandfather would've cursed it through clenched teeth, rage glistening in eyes that refused to weep.
I'm Mohammed—Mo to most. I live in what they now call the Sky Cities, a name too clean for platforms suspended in air, dangling above the land that used to be ours, that still calls to me in dreams. The "Two-Layer Accord" is what they teach us in school. Land for peace, air for dignity. But dignity feels thin when you're breathing borrowed air through recycled vents and pressurized tunnels.
My room's on the eastern edge of Platform 7. From there, when the shield is clear enough, I can see the ground. Not in detail—just the hazy silhouettes of trees, ruins, maybe old cities. Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah—they're dots now, flickering beneath us like ghosts. Sometimes I press my palm against the window until it hurts, as if I could somehow reach through. The shield shimmers between us and freedom—a prison of light. They call it protection, but at night it glows like a beautiful wound, mocking our tears with its radiance. I hate how it makes me weep.
My little sister Amira is only seven. She asked me what soil smells like last week, her innocent eyes wide with wonder. I couldn't answer, my throat tight with an unexplainable loss. Later that night, she tried to grow a basil seed in a cup of water. "Like the trees in Grandpa's videos," she said, her voice so full of hope it nearly broke me. I didn't have the heart to tell her it wouldn't work.
Dinner at 1900 hours. Mom's hands tremble setting plates, hospital uniform still on. Hydroponic herbs fail to mask recycled air. When I asked about it before, her voice broke: "Some memories are like broken glass. The more you touch them, the deeper they cut." Her white-knuckled grip on the spoon says everything she won't.
But I've seen her standing in the memory gardens—holographic projections of our old streets—her fingers brushing against walls that no longer exist, tears silently tracking down her cheeks. Dad is different though. He tells Amira stories, his voice thick with emotion he tries to swallow. He talks about orange trees and his mother's singing. Never the fires. Never the evacuation. His voice tightens like he's choking on silence.
Grandpa refused to leave when the Accord was enforced. "An old olive tree doesn't transplant well," he said, clutching a handful of soil as they pulled us away. He spent his last days staring at the earth and whispering poems in a cracked voice. On his final night, he held my hand with desperate strength and said: "They can lift us to the stars, but our roots will always remember the earth."
Even here, suspended in our sky prison, our souls cry for earth. This longing—a constant, bleeding wound in my chest. Someday we'll return home, if only as whispered prayers carried on wind.