Alshilla

We grew up side by side. Dressing alike, we went to McDonalds or Sindibad on the weekends because they were the only places with kids "playing areas". Later we returned to my grandfather’s house to have soup before we were released into the courtyard with the swing set. We played as we discussed things as abstract as religion to a kid to which one of us went to the better school to the idea of age—I convinced everyone that it had nothing to do with numbers, but had everything to do with height. (At the time I was the tallest of the bunch, which gave me instant power.) We recreated Jebel Ali, by tossing the masanid atop of each other, not knowing that Jabal Ali was just an area and not an actual mountain. I remember making up names of different kinds of "spins", the names of which we all knew by heart. One of us shouted a name, and we dropped everything and started spinning and spinning until all the objects around us turned into one, the floor beneath our feet sloped to one side, and we let our bodies rest on the ground with our eyes shut, describing our experience of what outer space must be like in relationship to our dizziness.

Image created by Munira Al Sayegh for her FIND story Steel Gate