Sunset Blood

Disoriented: Part 1

I squint against the beating sun as it sends fat drops of sweat down my forehead. Its heat is almost unbearable, and I'm glad that I decided to wear a light sundress instead of jeans. The wind howls through my hair, tugging at my clip and knotting my hair into a mess. The ground absorbs the sunlight and radiates heat back up at me through the soles of my shoes. I should have worn sunglasses, after all; this area is far more bright than I remember it being.

The blue sky is an unbroken line from one horizon to the other, punctuated by the blazing sun. Heat radiates against my skin and washes over me in waves, leaving me covered in sweat. Layer after layer of dry grass bakes under the afternoon sun, burning brown and brittle with every passing minute. The air is impossibly hot to breathe in and burns like fire against my skin. I try not to let the blasted sun get into my eyes. Everything glitters with the heat it's soaked up from the day, sending millions of tiny reflections back at me from every direction. When I lived in this desert, I was desperate for any chance at warmth, but now that infernal heat has me complaining. The sight is quite unusual. It's a perfect mix of the beautiful desert and the industrial side of a busy airport.

I was born in the heart of the Middle East, but I've never visited this part of the region before. I was born a traveller and even though I had lived most of my life over seas, I was still a stranger to the sprawling city I find myself in. I hope to perfect my Arabic here, so that I can communicate with my neighbours and shopkeepers. I have been learning the alphabet and basics with my parents, but I'm not fully comfortable with it yet. I've always been a pro at picking up new languages and concepts, but Arabic has already started to get a little in the way of my other studies. The trick is to keep on practicing until it starts to stick. One of these days, I'll be able to navigate the bazaar's aisles on my own and chat about the weather with customers. I will be enrolled in an international school, where the teachers teach English in an American accent and a book is consistently called a book.

There will be no conversation in the street at first, no ceremony when friends meet on the street. It will be a new culture and it won't be easy to adjust. It's a whole new life for me, but if my parents can do it, so can I. I look around at the foreign people; some of them look just as confused as I am. Some of them are here like me. Others are tourists. I wipe some water from my forehead and look down at the passport in my hands. It is battered, wrinkled and their ink is smeared. There are so many stamps in there, both from moves and vacations. It is well-worn, with several of the prints fading away as if they were never there. I open the passport and skim through the stamps, then close it and place it back in my bag beside my purse and boarding pass.

"Let's go," my dad says.

He walks ahead of us, going to the gate. My mom follows behind him, holding my hand. We walk across the airport, towards the gate for our flight. The airport around here looks different from the other ones I've been to. There are marble floors, there are more international stores and a lot of security guards. We go to the check-in counter. My father puts my suitcase on the belt and puts our boarding passes on the tray. He pockets his ticket and we walk through a metal detector and to a belt where our luggage goes through x-ray scanning. My mother puts her purse and pick her boarding pass off the tray and puts both of them into her purse. We go through security without taking off our shoes or setting anything on the conveyor belt. The man leads us to a door where there is no line. Part of diplomatic privileges I guess. I put my backpack on, pick up my suitcase, take my mom's hand and follow my dad out of the airport. We get outside and wait for the car to come. The sun has started to set. Its rays shoot out from the horizon, spreading out in a huge arch across the sky. Everything near them is highlighted beautifully, and the rest of the world is left in shadows. The colours remind me of a sunset in the desert; it is fiery, warm and everything bathed in it is red and orange. It always feels weird when we travel officially as the family of the Canadian ambassador. Everything is submerged in protocol.