It was a dark night full of birds and stars in the sky. I fell asleep on the ground on a mattress meticulously with details colored as white as the stars and as white as the birds that kept talking through the night. One night in Amman, Jordan, in my grandpa's house, he spent half of his time spectating pedestrians in the narrow street. It was after a long night of longing, my vacation was not the typical summer vacation people talked about to each other. My cousins were all asleep by then but I stayed awake with the white stars and doves, we all had one thing in common, insomnia and hope.
Another day passed, and I woke up in Nablus, Palestine, my hometown, which I had talked about back in Qatar. My grandmother's house was on a hill that raised many animals, and they all took good care of them. At 6 a.m., my grandma was kneading the dough. I sat down to help her because her leg was constantly upsetting her, and she kept complaining about it; about the weight of the contours of the mountains that carried their people, animals, and plantations.
I counted the stars in Palestine and Jordan. They seemed more than usual, with less pollution, fewer things happening, and fewer people every day. Even after growing up and being more observant in life, I still felt like I was missing something, something I still did not understand and was chasing throughout my journey within countries.
When I looked at the horizon across my hometown, it seemed as if everything was tilted. The sky was not like the sky I was used to back in Qatar. Something was missing. We used to wait for nighttime to come, to be able not to distinguish the tilted landscape, play card games, sneak to the yard to smoke, and listen to music that was all we understood in 2016.
When I grew up and changed, the sky took me to Jordan; back to where it all happened, back to the white doves, mars black night, and pink sunsets. When I was ready to understand what I was missing all this time, the room where we all gathered, yet here again we gathered around my grandpa's restless corpse. On that night, the wrinkled cold overwhelmed my body. The furniture in his house grieved, the clock stopped ticking, the TV lost its signal, and the couch broke its leg; they all carried weights and heights of people relying on them.
At the end of the night, I realized what I was missing all this time - whatever attaches me to those places, people, or things, I will never feel everything in one place. I will grieve one day in Jordan, the other in Qatar, and lastly end my grief in Palestine, I was one artery traveling through three bodies of countries, with the same blood, carrying different things to each body.