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On Saturday afternoon the collective decision was made to take down the last of the barricades around Gezi. We didn’t need them anymore, we had proved ourselves to be peaceful. A few hours after they were dismantled the police attacked. A few hours after that new ones were erected.

Doors of apartment buildings opened and out flooded a population of a city into the night. When its not just protestors, but people; it changes —a government doesn’t know what to do when it confronts not parties but people. Violence had returned to Gezi, and occupied it with their gases and guns. As I write there are 70’000 people in the street. It’s spreading and flooding in the windows. It’s not the gas, but singing. They are chanting “Government Resign!”.

A night gets bigger than itself, there are surges in the songs. The main streets were arteries and we were the antibodies.

We pushed forwards because there was no other choice. If you climbed anything all you saw was people, facing forwards and holding ground. Groups of men ripped railings from their streets and passed the heavy wrought iron forwards to the frontlines. Flowers were trampled underfoot. I’m sorry.

Ahead they shot fireworks at the police, as the police gassed everyone. The police shot gas into the hotel lobby that had become a hospital; they gassed the people they had already injured. They gassed the children who were lost from their parents in the violent eviction. Doctors were arrested. When you are arrested for treating someone but not for shooting them, where do you draw the line? Gas should never be used indoors; no one could see anything. Justice is blind.

They arrested even the piano.

The barricades sprayed out like the skeletons of whales, jagged boards like a spine across the street. If we could only hold this space long enough, we could build the next barricade, we could advance, back towards Gezi. Lines of people passed rocks into piles, small stones and scrap wood —you must forge your defenses from whatever you can find (so build your barricades next to construction sites). Many hands make light work, and the barricades grew inside the safety of our multitudes. Hurriedly we were constructing something, together.

The barricades we built were lines that cannot be crossed. Everyone of us has these lines like a barometer of justice inside our own noble souls. We know when it is attacked, blunted; defiled. But justice loads like a spring; you can push it down ever so slowly. Pressure builds in a closed space, there are limits to what we can allow.

Journalists, lawyers, and doctors arrested. Children tear gassed in their mother’s arms. 5 Deaths. Pro-government newspapers all with the same headline. Other newspapers censored. A prohibition of drinking tea on the street. And a park.

How do you confront violence such as this? When their only weapon is fear, though their tactics vary. The referee starts attacking the players, and no one in the stands is allowed to watch.

Our crowds were pushed back, because the police play without rules. When the laws encroach dangerously close to your body; what you can drink, when, where: where do you draw the line? When you are beaten for holding the flag of the country that pays those who beat you: where do you draw the line? Behind every gas canister shot lingers a line of smoke, these lines tie the sky into knots. It rains tears.

After you draw a line you build it. The barricades around Gezi are lines that have been crossed.

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We could hold the street corner because of the fountain. By now, after two weeks of fighting people had lost their fear of the gas. More people ran towards the canisters than away. Well practiced teams grabbed the smoking tubes and tossed them into water and closed the containers; or just threw the gas back. A burning barricade was kept alight by molotovs so the water cannons couldn’t drive over it; fire stopping water from passing. They had started pouring chemicals into the water they shot at us; it burnt the skin, but we were out of range.

We held a small corner, as all over the city small corners were held.

The main streets had been lost by midnight. Our barricade was mostly plants in large cement pots. It could be cleared in minutes. It was a tenuous hold. For hours the corner was held in a sickly game of back and forth. They shot the gas, we threw it back. They had broken through the main barricade in front of Osmanbey metro station, so now their goal was to keep us back as they dismantled it. We staying in this limbo for hours, alive.

At the other end of our block there was no position to hold, so everything was in motion. It was like every one of the four elements was deceived and coerced into violence: the police shot water, the people threw stones, gas filled the air, garbage fires burned as barricades. In this grey landscape of smoke and stones, young men shot pebbles at the police from their slingshots. Police shot their gas guns. Everyone cowered at the sound, then gas arose from somewhere. People returned fire with rocks and then ran on.

When little else is left for a people they throw stones.

We live in glass cities, facades reflecting the blue of sky as inside the bankers deal to destroy even it. A pebble puts a crack in a lie. One day, all these glass buildings will be greenhouses, and no one will have to throw stones.

Around 3am people started digging up the sidewalk bricks to build up the barricade, prying them out with a stray piece of metal they pulled from a street sign. A chain formed and passed the bricks forward. Quickly the police pushed forward, harder and farther than before. This, they would not allow. People were pushed back and we climbed back inside. Now, from our window we saw the police advancing as dark machines, robotic and heavy in their movements, sweeping the street like a net in the ocean. Everyone became a magician and disappeared, but slowly and all together. The police pulled back —they kept close to their vehicles and their vehicles needed the width of main streets. The people returned in their wake.

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