Homeland

She stares sightlessly at the form before her, the spider scrawl of the printed prose sitting unregistered before her absent eyes. Why do you wish to become an American citizen, it reads. She knows, because she deciphered the question over twelve minutes ago. Her thoughts are swirling in her mind like fugitive kites over Kabul. Now is not the time to think about Kabul. Smothering heat and suffocating burqas. Little boys playing football barefoot in tainted gold dirt with a deflated ball and children's unique sense of intense enthusiasm. Derelict, abandoned homes, their empty fountains filled with mud and vacant courtyards filled with dry, dead, exotic plants betraying a grandeur that once was and is no more, their inhabitants exiled or dead –killed. Turn a corner and the dark blue form is in the older part of Kabul, a myriad of mud houses baking in the smouldering sun and smothering silence of the midday heat. And then, the blood, its smell rendered rustier by the alley's dust and the 'For Israel' she murmurs as a ritual.

So much of her own blood has seeped into the soil of what she once called her homeland, linking her forever to her Tali whose scarlet life was absorbed in an absurd bloom by the dirt of a blown up café's sidewalk. It links her to her brothers in arms, those who died and those who haven't died yet, and to her mother who never bled but still lies surrounded by liquid souls in that forever burgundy soil. She has left so much of her soul there, a bigger piece every time she has fired a gun, thrown a life, strangled a cry and destroyed a man. A piece for each drop of blood, hers and the blood that might as well be hers for she claimed it and feels responsible for it.

She stares, fractured-souled and empty-veined and she signs. Because somewhere in all of that whirlwind of death and blood, of destruction and pride, of torture and loss, she has clung to a fragment of herself, unreasonably, instinctively and stubbornly, clutching that shard so hard that it cut into her flesh and bled into her palm: hope.