words as airplanes

She smiles when she shows them to me, like she’s sharing a secret.

“I take them everywhere,” she says. The bag is pink and made of shiny plastic. It has a unicorn on the front. And inside, there’s a stack of books. My cousin is five, but her mother teaches English and she reads very well for her age.

“Even when you go to Beirut?” I ask.

“Yes,” Carmen says. She speaks slowly, taking care to enunciate all her words. Still, she says “th” like “d” and her accent is charmingly thick. “It is boring. I like read while my mother shop.”

Beirut has been my favorite part of Lebanon. I’m a city girl. I like skyscrapers and nonstop noise, and I like being with people. Beirut is different from cities back home. The smells are mostly familiar: car exhaust, sweat, coffee. There’s a foreign tang in the herbs and spices wafting from nearby restaurants, though, and I draw stares. Carmen’s brother says I look American. Ayman is 11 and very sharp. My parents are Lebanese, but I reek of America. There is something breathtaking about the feeling of being an intruder. It transcends even Beirut’s beauty.

Beirut, though it’s only 45 minutes away, is also very different from the town where Carmen lives, a cluster of small buildings perched on the side of a mountain. The roads are perilous. They’re built right into the cliffs, so on one side your car presses up against a solid rock wall and on the other, there’s nothing but open air and the dizzying promise of a lethal drop. There are no traffic signs or stoplights that far from Beirut. At night, you can hardly see the divide between two lanes until another car comes from the opposite direction with blinding headlights.

I don’t think anything about Lebanon is boring, but perhaps Carmen has more discerning taste than I.

“I like to read, too,” I tell her. I recall being not much taller than Carmen. I’d take books to the mall, to relatives’ houses, to restaurants. When I read "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," I perfected the art of simultaneous walking and reading. The 734-page novel was huge in my spindly, fragile fingers, and I had to hold it with both hands.

I met Carmen for the first time a week ago and will leave Lebanon at the month’s end. It seems absurdly unfair that I should just now be learning that I have a five-year-old cousin who carries books around in a pink unicorn backpack.

I tell her, “I was like you when I was little.”

She shrugs. This is not news to her. “Of course!” she says. “We’re cousins.”