Aya was five years old when she first saw a balloon. A red one, shiny and bobbing above the street, tied to the wrist of a child who no longer lived in Gaza.
It was during a brief moment of calm, the kind of temporary silence that comes after bombs but before the next airstrike. Her father, Mahmoud, had taken her for a walk near the old market, the one that still smelled like cardamom and roasted corn despite being bombed twice in the past three years. That’s where she saw it, the balloon, floating with such delicate defiance against a sky heavy with dust.