Among the Olive Trees
We used to play among the olive trees, chasing each other in games of tag or mission impossible, dashing from tree to tree as if their thin knobbly trunks could hide us. We were careless then, impervious to the hardship of the outer world… there were walls built around our places of play, containing our laughter. We called these places home, the space between the olive trees, the safe bubble of our existence. I suppose we must’ve always known we looked like outsiders, though. The older we got, the more obvious it became. We had only to look at the different color of our skin and hair, which was uncovered, to realize we were the foreigners in this land. We had only to be stared at by hungry eyes on the streets we walked and be told not to make eye contact, not to laugh out loud, and not to show too much skin to realize we were not free beyond the walls of our safe zones, in this place we called home. When did we realize what this did to our relationships to our bodies? Dista...