paper plane

Yemen

Yamanat

Majid Mohammadi

In a vast green field, I ran as if the earth opened a path of light for me. My blonde locks fly behind me like a trail of music, and my arms extend like free wings, shaking the air and catching the breeze in secret play. My little dress, flowered like a miniature garden, rose slightly with each jump, as if it too wanted to fly.

I didn’t know why the whole world was shining like that, or why the grass was laughing under my feet. All I knew was that something in my soul was expanding, as if my childhood was transforming into a bird that wanted to escape my grasp.

Then I saw it… a long line stretching through the grass, as if the earth was revealing its secret. I leaned towards him, touched him with a shudder of astonishment, then began to follow him. It flowed past me like an invisible pulse…until it suddenly ended with a quivering kite in the sky. I gripped the rope tightly and lifted the plane higher… higher… the more I held on to it, as if it was lifting me with it, pulling me towards a sky that I love and wanted to reach…

And just when I felt like I was about to leave the ground, something broke.

I opened my eyes,

It wasn’t the sky above me, but a pale white ceiling. The thread was not in my hand, but rather on the edge of a cold quilt. My breathing echoes in the silence of the room and the sounds of faint devices reach my ears as if they were distant footsteps.

I looked at my shaking hands…they were still holding him like it was the last thing left from my run through the grass.

There, at the limits of consciousness, the kite moved away, disappeared. And I stretched out my hand towards her, not to catch up with her, but to catch up with this child who had run one day in the fields… the child whom, suddenly, it seemed to me that I had been following for a long time.

My childhood… was a lost plane. And here I was, on the hospital bed, just a woman trying to retrieve her last thread before it was lost to the wind…

Yemen