The New Kids

These three are the first of the “new generation” after mine. It took me 12 years after they were born to drop the prefix of “baby” before any of their names. They took over on their own terms, created new imaginary games that involved kitchen paper towel rolls, soap, water, and a secret ingredient which, to this day, has never been disclosed to any of the cousins who didn’t partake in their childhood activity. Their boredom soon fed into ours. We overtook a room that had a floor-to-ceiling shelf filled with books stacked on top of each other; parallel to the shelf was a deck of rolled up Iranian carpets and one random old couch that could fit us all as kids. We would turn off the lights, and I would sit on the carpets. Welcoming the new generation in, as my cousins who were my age had them sit down, we transferred that storage room into a new place through interactive stories which we called FairyLand.

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