Tiny pieces

I've been eating these chocolate eggs with toys inside, like Kinder but I buy the off-brand eggs that are only one shekel ($0.25). I like the toys in these better than the ones in Kinder, which seem somehow more ~advanced~, but they lack a certain quality. Something like honesty. They're trying too hard, like many things here do. I like the things that are forgetting to try, just getting by, working hard while they do it. These little toys in the off-brand eggs are working very hard to work, because somehow the small pieces never quite fit together. But once you force them into place, you have a small piece of tired success, nostalgia and fine-tuned pride, all in one small plastic toy.

These are things I see in Palestine everywhere. Like Ramallah: Ramallah is fun, but it's trying too hard to be something it isn't, something that's Western and works. There's always a discord there, like in the Kinder toys, because everyone knows there's something wrong here, so why are we pretending? I love Nablus because it doesn't try to be anything it's not; everything in Nablus is on the surface, easy to see. They work hard here and they seem tired, too tired to pretend to be anything other than proud and tired Palestinians.

I feel the same discord in the stares. Stares from the men here try so hard to achieve something beyond just looking. They ask you to look back, which you don't, because if you look back you're inviting something you don't want. The stares are trying so hard to be something that the men are not- something that reminds me of the worst parts of home. They are stares that make me want to be something I'm not. They make me want to be modest, more modest than I'm already striving to be in this place. They make me ashamed of my hair, because why should my hair attract these stares unless its something blasphemous.

If the men's stares make it all fall apart, the stares of the Palestinian women put it all back together. The women stare too, but in a completely different way. The stares of the women are the ones that I like, that make me feel whole instead of unsure. They stare only at times when they have to, and they stare with purpose, as if they're really trying to figure something out when they look at you. They make me question the stare I give back, because I know it doesn't compare in depth, in substance, but I'm getting better at returning them with confidence. There eyes have that same honesty and pride, the feeling that they know something is not quite working, but they have knowledge to force it into some quasi-working order.

I think the women are the ones who save Palestine from complete chaos. They are handed a world that is being town apart every day by the occupation, and they struggle to make sense of it. They save Palestine because if you can't do what they do, you're just stuck with a lot of tiny pieces that don't quite fit together.