My Jerusalem Moon

As far as I can tell, I am the last student studying. It is one twenty in the morning and I haven't finished my homework. We are all overwhelmed by the pages of reading, by the theories of scholars who've put a lifetime of work into articles students read just so they can make it through class the next day.

Zoroastrianism.

Catholicism.

Islam.

Judaism.

So many religions interconnected and weaving into one another like the streets of the old city in Jerusalem. And yet we keep our religions separate like the physical walls and gates in the Holy Land do for peoples of different beliefs. But we run into one another. We talk to one another.

We cannot escape one another. 

And perhaps we don't want to, despite history and hard feelings. I watch Arabs taking photos of me and my friends on the sly as we study, our backs against a wall that has history mortared in its cracks, and I do not feel afraid. The people here are in some ways a novelty to me, just as I am to them ... to the taxi drivers who ask if we want a ride. To the seven year old boy who wants us to kick his soccer ball. To the teenage girl who has been dared by her friends to speak to us in English.

We cannot escape one another.

And later as I force myself to study, to flip to the next page in the small confines of the royally carpeted library, I eventually walk down to my room. The hallway exhales with open sky above me, framing the moon above my head. It is ripe and full enough for my fist to hold. I have sung to this moon in this very spot. I have whispered to it and gazed on it, and found comfort in the fact that my family and people everywhere, no matter our differences, are looking at the same moon that I am. That we are inseparable even if we do not know it. 

That we are sharing this moon. 

It is ours.