Things Noticed In Small Spaces

Standing right in the middle of the line, it didn't occur to me that there was a lot to take in in such a small space.All I wanted to do was to get past Qalandia checkpoint.
“Mama, when will we get there?” my little sister asked in Arabic, tugging my mother’s sleeve.
“In a bit,” my mother replied, staring ahead, a knot formed between her eyebrows.When her eyebrows relaxed, the sweat formed there began to fall, and like a reflex, I raised my hand to my forehead wiping away my own sweat.Through the dark shades of my sunglasses, I stared at my mother.Was she thinking of the road trip she took 25 years ago with her sisters to Jerusalem in their own car and how it only took minutes?
I decided to make a silent prayer to kill time. However, just as I was about to begin, I heard the sound of a boy singing.
“You’re so beautiful, my love! So beautiful!”
I looked over my shoulder past the people and noticed a lean, teenage boy with tanned skin and gelled hair.
The soldier began yelling "SHUT UP!", his legs propped up onto the desk with his weapon nested on his chest. He looked like he was only a few years older than the teenage boy.The boy began to drum on the metal bars, and for the first time during the trip, I was repulsed by nothing but my immediate surrounding.
The line wasn't one that I could step out of like I used to in my class line at school.The metal bars the teenage boy was drumming on, rusting and only wide enough to stick an arm or leg, surrounded my sides.The space I was in allowed one adult looking straight ahead to stand in.There was barbed wire swirled on the top.I looked through the metal bars into the watch room.The soldier was still there, and here we were in a human-sized birdcage.
To the contrary of excuses made in the name of security, the reason many of us were in this birdcage was because of our Palestinian identities.However, with a visa pressed to the check-in window, a soldier eyeing it carefully, and a few clicks on a keyboard gave me my “Go.”
“Is this Jerusalem?” my little sister asked.
“No.The bus will take us.” I smiled at her innocence of such things mirroring what was once mine.
I may have passed the checkpoint, others waiting, and the boy drumming on the metal bars of the birdcage behind, but one element that moved with me was the gray wall that is planned to run 700 kilometers of apartheid, normalization, and graffiti, laughing in my face as if to say, “And you almost thought you were out of the birdcage.”