"Isn't it amazing?" she asked, expecting my answer to be as enthusiastic as her question. We were standing in line at a bakery near the sea in Tel Aviv where had brought her bicycle into this already small space as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps from this neighborhood she could not see the wall that had been built between the State of Israel and the disputed territories of Palestine. Maybe at so early an hour she had yet to have the conversation with the Palestinian cab driver that I had only days before in which he welcomed my mother and I to his big prison, which some days were blessed with electricity and running water and others were not. And maybe she might never have the conversation that I had in Lebanon with another Palestinian man who carries with him papers of an inordinate size that speak not of citizenship or a country to which he belonged, but of his lack thereof. Perhaps she might never hear the ache in the voice of a man who longed for a home that he would never ever see. Maybe concentrating only on her coffee she is able to ignore this world that collapses and not expands all around her. Maybe from the height of her bicycle seat she sees the way in which children carry the weight of the metallic world so recklessly across their shoulders as a means of protection and not as I see it: a phenomenon so unnerving that my skin crawls and my heart breaks. Maybe, from the freedom of her bicycle she is able to breathe the air that suffocates me here in this place.
So as I sit on the plane and scroll through photographs of these past ten days: a desert without end, a sea without life, graffiti over a decade old that tells the story of a conflict that is too old to be forgotten, grounds of persecution, crucifixion, and ascension in the name of all that is holy transformed into spirituality as spectacle, I, too, have a question I would like to ask the world:
"Amazing, isn't it?"