As of the end of March 2023, I’d officially been in California for 2 years. Since I first landed in 2021, I kept seeing mentions of The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing pop up in Instagram comments or Twitter replies whenever someone asked for book recommendations, especially in relation to Los Angeles. In the book, Laing analyzes her own solitude in NYC through the work of artists (like Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper) who have also experienced a form of loneliness in their lives. I promised myself that I’d read it while living there and I finished it just before my one-way flight back to Beirut. As someone who had left a shattered Lebanon in search of some refuge and boredom, the Valley of SoCal was a good decision when I made it. It was supposed to be a launchpad for the next move but the problem was that, as the restlessness began building after 18 months, I still couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go if that somewhere else wasn’t Beirut.

At that point, I was afraid to go back to Beirut because of the hole I was in in 2021 just 6 months after the city was blown up. The disconnect that only a 10-hour time difference can provide was helpful. I’ve repeatedly said that California is on its own axis, far away from everywhere, even itself. At first, this was a good thing. I needed the distance to climb out of that hole I was in. I needed to not be able to tap into the daily madness that Lebanon had become and it still took months to let go of the urge to stay plugged into Lebanon’s heartbeat. What I didn’t know though was that I had gone from one extreme to another, trading the isolation of COVID for the isolation of suburbia. By the time I finally came up for air, I had morphed into a hermit who rarely ventured outside the safe zone of the pastel suburbs of Edward Scissorhands. My part-time job at a wine shop 30 minutes away became the only thing that would force me out of the stucco & beige, cop-loving town a few times a week.

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant’s wail: I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held. It was the sensation of need that frightened me the most, as if I’d lifted the lid on an unappeasable abyss.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

When I would try to schmooze at gatherings and house parties, I was an insecure alien. I hadn’t perfected my elevator pitch when meeting new folks but I stopped saying I had moved over from Beirut to avoid being put in a predetermined box. I only felt understood around others like me who had come from some other “broken” place like my colleagues who came over from El Salvador, another colleague’s father who had left Argentina over 50 years ago, my favorite wine shop customer from Nigeria, or my Lebanese/Arab friends who didn’t #livelovebeirut their way through the idea of their homeland. It wasn’t just about being hyphenated, it was about knowing another version of yourself that you’d have to leave behind every time you chose America as a place or identity.

…Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

I once wrote about how my friend, Dyala, said she wanted to hug the walls before leaving Lebanon and while in suburbia, I kept thinking about those walls, how I missed them and how they defined and confined me. I worried that I had been institutionalized in the way described by Morgan Freeman’s character in Shawshank Redemption because I could relate to Brooks, the old man who couldn’t plug back into society after 50 years in prison. In a letter to his former inmates, he writes, “I’m tired of being afraid all the time,” before he ends his life on the outside. I did not reach that level of desperation to escape my situation but I knew that feeling of being alone in a place that I hadn’t caught up with. I didn’t feel inferior, I felt angry that this version of a country was lauded as the gold standard with its poor healthcare, lack of community, and shitty tomatoes. I shrunk and avoided dealing with people because I’d frequently find myself reciting an autobiography instead of just talking about my weekend. I was a small fish in a disgusting, freshwater pond dreaming about the salty Mediterranean. And then again, I’d wonder if that irritability was because Lebanon had institutionalized me. Perhaps I had waited too long to get out.

I knew suburbia wasn’t it for me but I was scared about returning to Beirut and what that would mean. In her piece on why we don’t live near our friends when it can do so much good for our well-being, Anne Helen Petersen writes, “it’s worth thinking about the stories we tell ourselves, the excuses we embroider, when it comes to not doing the things we’d really like to do.” I had created this internal pressure to make it work and that if I didn’t, leaving the “functional” ghirbeh (foreign land) meant I wasn’t independent, strong, or capable. Where did this come from? What was I trying to prove and to who? When I go back and I read this essay I wrote a year ago, I remember that when I published it, I thought I had begun to accept my new chapter in California. When I read it now however, I see that none of the emotions went away, they just got louder until I didn’t want to fight them anymore.

In the now-paywalled Aanab News December 2022 newsletter, I wrote about a heart-to-heart I had with my close friend while visiting her in Boston:

Where did this demonizing of the comfort zone come from when that’s what we are all striving to recreate in another time zone?

Upon visiting Beirut the summer before this happened, I felt a shift in the country and not because fantastical summers in Lebanon are the peak of our collective delusion. In one day, I saw 6 different friends in intervals from the same coffee shop booth and that was more social activity than I had had in 6 months (or more) in California. On one rotation in that booth, I caught up with Mikey, master of all random social ceremonies and afikra, and he pointed out that the musical chairs I was playing would naturally diminish the more time I spent bil ghirbeh and I remember thinking, I can’t let those spinning social hula hoops drop in exchange for Panda Express orange chicken. When I saw my friend, Lilian, for coffee on one of my last evenings, she said a sentence that now sits behind my corneas affecting everything I see. She told me that I commit so strongly to my decisions but not everything has to be big, permanent, and final.

“They can just be one way until they’re not,” she said.

But still, after this quick aperitif of sticky heat and mosquitoes, I headed back to LA. Every time I left the U.S. in those two years, it felt like my cat, Penny, was the main motivator pulling me back west but, deep down, I wasn’t ready to fully ditch it yet. I convinced myself that what I was feeling about Beirut was an illusion and I couldn’t let her seduce me. I wouldn’t let her pull me back into her rib-crushing embrace. Any time I had felt that tug of homesickness while away, I’d beat it with right hooks of rationality: don’t fall for the facade of glorified dysfunction, don’t let that nostalgia seep through the cracks, don’t romanticize what is still rotting. Still, the bemro2 3aleike (I’ll pass by) behavior that is quintessentially Beirut haunted me for months after that summer visit. I kept thinking about the utter ease of company, the walls I could lean on – were they solid enough to go back to or would they fall in on me as soon as I felt safe again?

Loneliness as a desire for closeness, for joining up, joining in, joining together, for gathering what has otherwise been sundered, abandoned, broken or left in isolation. Loneliness as a longing for integration, for a sense of feeling whole.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

Just like with leaving Beirut, I needed to reach the decision of leaving California in my own time. By January 2023, I was at peace with the tradeoff I was actively choosing: swapping the convenience of things for the convenience of people.

None of this is to say that Lebanon is getting better, it has shifted to a comfier couch but it is still stagnant. The lucky few have adapted and the most vulnerable must submit to a dollarized economy. I’m not saying I’m here because things have been resolved or because there are even hints at a recovery plan. I came back because I didn’t want to be there anymore. That’s all I knew for sure. However, there have been moments where I’m driving down Manara or running my hands through a wall of flowers or bumping into 3 people across one afternoon that I feel like my heart’s going to pop out of my throat because I’m so happy to be here. Then I catch myself, mentally pause, and hunch inwards to contain it because I’m scared this high is going to slip away, because I want to brace myself for its inevitable end. I haven’t figured out how to turn off this trauma response of robbing myself of my own joy for fear that it won’t last, that it may not even be real or deserved to begin with. There is so much guilt wrapped up in the privilege of being happy somewhere like Lebanon.

This week, my dentist asked me, “what have you done?!” and not about my teeth but about how I had no exit or return ticket booked. I’m used to people not agreeing with Lebanon as a valid choice. When Anthony Bourdain, patron saint of the epicurious, returned to Beirut after being evacuated in 2006, he asked, “am I wrong to love this place?” I know things are bad but I have a new appreciation for the good I lost sight of in 2020. As the precarious situation continues, I can only sum up my feelings as simply as he did,

“In spite of everything, I love it here.“

Anthony Bourdain on Beirut

It’s been almost 3 years since the Beirut Port Blast but still, when I walk though Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael now, I ask myself every few steps, would I survive in this spot if the Port blew up right now? I nonchalantly accept this conscious awareness of sudden death (also known as PTSD?) in the streets of Beirut but when I would think about death in California, I was laughed at for being scared of anything given where I grew up. My greatest fear when I left was that, in an emergency, I’d need around 25 hours to travel back to Beirut for what could only be a nightmare that I might miss by the time I land. I have thought about death a lot in the last 5 years and when I was on the other side of the Atlantic, two unrelated friends from Beirut close to my age passed away unexpectedly just 4 months apart. Although I regrettably wasn’t very close to either, their losses hit hard because they were reminders that every mediocre day I was spending in California was a day I was lighting on fire and tossing in the trash. I was burning a precious chunk of my own wick without knowing how much more of it was left. With all this consciousness around death, I hadn’t considered my own mortality in my move. Who said I wasn’t going to be the one in an emergency, 25 hours away? What I know now is that dying in a car crash or an earthquake or a fucking mass shooting at Albertsons was actually a fear of dying alone, of not being able to reach for the hands I needed to hold. After another holiday season solo, I didn’t want to keep throwing away the pages of my life, I wanted to be home.

And so, I’m here until I’m not and right now, here feels pretty good.

As of 2 weeks ago, I’ve been in California for a year, and everyday since, I ask myself that question. It’s the same one my dad asks me every few months. 

My peers have been leaving Beirut since I graduated in 2009. For every ten that left, one would quietly return after a year or two away. They’d finished their master’s degree and couldn’t find a job or they were unhappy abroad. When I’d hear of their return, I’d think it was because they couldn’t cut it on the outside, they were weak, and they came back to their comfort zone where they knew the potholes, the dekkenji, and electricity cuts. They knew their coiffeur with the green hand and they knew their way around without Google Maps. They couldn’t make it in the West and they returned to the uncivilized shithole where they could forget about the pressures of the future and stick to focusing on just that coming Thursday. It wasn’t the same for me because I had chosen to stay all along. These were arrogant assumptions for me to make, someone who hadn’t been away from Beirut for more than 6 months in my adult life. I was projecting a fear of my own onto others and I now wonder if the reason I stayed so long wasn’t that I loved Lebanon so intensely but because I didn’t want to leave and come running back a year later, unable to accept my own insignificance outside of my small pond. I wanted to be sure that when I did leave, because it was only a matter of time, I wouldn’t come back so soon after departure. That I would make it in America (or wherever) because I was good enough to. That I wasn’t just good enough for the kakistocracy of Lebanon. It didn’t occur to me, the person who was deeply enamored in the city that formed me, that people would come back because they were tired of fighting to belong somewhere else. That they were tired of distance.

Last month, I was speaking to my former Geitawi neighbor who’s now back in London. We were talking about our recent exits from Lebanon and how it’s been hard to reconcile our timelines with the rest of the world’s. Living in Beirut for so long, I used to feel that those who had left (and not moved back) had gone down a slide into the ocean of adulthood while I stayed in the shallow end of the pool that is Lebanon. The pandemic was the Great Pause that made us all float on donuts in a lazy river without any sense of falling behind. We were all meandering in the uncertainty. We didn’t need to figure out how to climb out of our holes because every human was in a trench with banana bread. But now, as the world reopens, that sense that I am behind is verified. Those around me have already acclimated as their main concern has subsided; meanwhile, I’m at the bottom of the professional food chain with an obliterated ego. I have left Beirut and I’m trying to catch up with people who didn’t float in the same river as I did for the last two years. 

I want to say that I’ve gotten the hang of it, being here, but it’s been repeated rounds of readjustment. I’m still untying the knots that were braided too tightly. How long can the “last two years” be a valid excuse for not finding your way back to yourself? How long before “I’m still healing” or “I’m still in transition” are no longer active promo codes and I’m just failing? How long before I admit that this is just who I am now? Will I ever be the person I was again? 

I work in a family-owned wine retail shop here. It’s like a parallel life to what I did in Beirut, except it’s not my family and I’m surrounded by more wine than I’ve ever had access to. I can’t remember a lot of what I learned before 2019 and I wonder if the memory gaps in my wine knowledge are related to what came after or if I just miss experiential learning. Wine is supposed to be my bailiwick but being in a place where what I do know isn’t as important as what I don’t know has made my confidence evaporate. In my 6 months of being at this shop, I’ve carved out a corner for “Ancient World” wines which has made me the point person for any wine that the rest of the staff don’t care about. Natural, Croatian, Armenian, Slovenian, send it to Farrah. By being invested in furthering Lebanon’s wine presence, I have become a buyer for all other nations.

“I don’t know how old you are but when I was 34, I was working in restaurants, and the place I was working at went under. I had to start over with $600 in my pocket,” says a well-off older customer after asking me what I was doing before I got the job that introduced us to each other. All I had said was that I left Beirut a year ago because things had gotten messy. Unlike many people I’ve said that to, he knew what I wasn’t saying based on his response. Before he left he told me, “good luck with everything, you’ll be okay.” I’ve hardened so these interactions don’t snap me in half immediately but they catch up with me later, usually in the form of spontaneous, uncontrollable tears in a Target aisle or on the 101 when I see a cop’s lights in my rearview. 

I convince myself that this little entry-level gig I have makes an impact. Our wines in a shop that can ship to the majority of US states is a big win and my being there will facilitate their success. In my frustrated moments, I think about the longevity of it all and if this small dent I’ve made will be filled with German Rieslings when I’m not there to replenish the rack with Merwah. 

One day when I was feeling like I’m pushing for an industry that doesn’t notice what I do or how I do it, I received an email from a Bekaa Valley wine producer in response to my January 2022 newsletter. “We miss you lots back in the old country where you made a difference. I won’t say more.” I stared at the kind words but all I could see were ones that weren’t there. The words that play in my mind: does what I do *here* matter?

“Why can’t Beirut be your base?” says my dad as I’m about to drive in for an extra shift. “You’re just working in a wine shop.” I know it comes from a place of missing me but it’s a gut punch. My job doesn’t warrant living on the other side of the planet and I have to justify choosing it over being at home with them. Needing to convince my parents of decisions for my well-being that even I’m not convinced of is a headfuck. What am I doing here? Is this what I came here to do? What’s keeping me away?

Of all the heroes in Marvel & DC, my favorite has been Batman. I had thought it was because he was just a flawed human at the core, no powers bestowed upon him besides his family’s wealth that allowed him to build a secret lair and don a super suit. Grimey Gotham, interpreted by many to be the comic book world’s New York City, was always Beirut to me. In the latest Batman film with Robert Pattinson which is more crime-drama than action-adventure, I see it even more and I see myself in the privileged yet damaged, cynical yet hopeful, protective yet unprotected Bruce Wayne. In it, he says, “The city is eating itself. Maybe it’s beyond saving. But I have to try.” 

I have trained myself to go down the list of reasons why Beirut can’t be my base. It’s the same list I repeated internally until I got on the plane last March. At this point, I have a speech I recite to myself: Being here is rehab, to be here is to heal and process what happened before I left. Beirut has not been good for you even if you won’t admit that to anyone here. This doesn’t have to be permanent. California may not be where you want to be long-term but it’s what you need right now. 

“You sound like you’re grieving,” says a therapist I can’t justify paying for beyond that first consultation call. It does feel like a great loss. Loss of a country, a former life, and even the future one I wanted to have on my apartment’s dining table that is now covered by bedsheets. Is wanting to go back a sign that I have healed or is it a sign that I don’t want to? There are some days when I don’t want to self-regulate, days when I just want to stay in my delusional nostalgia for just a little longer.

I went to the doctor last month for a regular check-up. In an effort to distract me from the exhilarating experience of a Pap smear’s gynoculars which function like a cervical crowbar, the doctor went with what should be a normal question about how my family is doing back home. “You’re tensing up,” she says.

That’s not to say that I haven’t felt myself melting into the manicured grass of suburbia. Here, as I’ve said before, my thoughts are soap bubbles above my head that have time to hover before they burst. I have the luxury of reflecting in steady solitude. The distance, while being the thing I hate the most about California, is also why it has been restorative. It is so far away that tuning out Lebanon is effortless. There is a part of me that submits to this more and more as the days pass even though everything I do is tied to the country. Each day, I allow the ignorance to wash over me a little more, so much so that it scares me. But I want to stay in the sunshine just a little longer. 

And again, it is the distance that is also destructive to this restoration. It’s a detached reality from the one that I know. I forget that I’m half American and that I was born here because this alienation is how I felt as a child too. I only understood that after moving to Lebanon and now I’m here again but I’m resisting the permanence. I want to be present but I don’t have the energy to explain all that I am to people, the kind of explanation that is required for meaningful connections.

Then there are things that take me out of where I am and bring me back to where I was. Like when a vendor who sliced his finger open when he dropped a massive wine bottle said he’s still finding glass a week later. It was a harmless statement but I flinched. The words my friend’s mother said came back to me as he said it, the words she said as we swept up glass darts that had shot at the walls of her apartment after the Beirut Port Blast. “We’re going to be finding glass for years after this,” she said with exhaustion because she’d done this before. For months after the blast, people were posting shards that were found in their houses.

Last week, there was a power cut at the shop because of a faulty timer. My station’s UPS battery beeped and I translated the meaning to the shop’s frantic owner like I was speaking a foreign language that he refused to believe I spoke. I wished I wasn’t fluent but at that moment, I thought of Lina Mounzer’s afikra Conversations interview where she unpacked “the privilege of marginalization” and how growing up in a cracked snow globe will make you question where the snow is coming from. I have been increasingly grateful for the perspective and the skill set that Lebanon has given me, despite what it took to acquire both. The privilege of an early shattering of illusions makes you look for the icebergs no one can see on the calm waters because you are always counting lifeboats, always filling buckets, always aware that nothing is constant except the sea. As Mounzer aptly put it, “you’re aware that you’re not the center of the universe.” My lack of trust in systems and my faith in the community has me confused as to why Americans are not in the streets protesting every single day. All that I can conclude is that the people are not united against the government in the same way. They believe it functions because it is only everywhere else that is broken. Everyone else wants to come here so it can’t be that bad, right?

I’m trying to learn more about the wines from the rest of the world so that the thing that differentiates me (my knowledge of Lebanese wine) isn’t also the thing that limits me. But when I research Sicilian grapes, I look at links to our sea trade, its lingering Arab influence, and the origins of the Zibibbo grape (North Africa). When I work on an email about a New Zealand Chardonnay, I get lost in the Maori concept of Tūrangawaewae. While this one (non-Maori) producer tried to claim it as an interpretation of terroir, it feels deeper than that to me. Tūrangawaewae is your place in the world and where you have a sense of belonging, where you feel empowered, connected, and rooted. “Tūranga” means standing place and “waewae” means feet so together, it is the solid ground you stand on. I read that and I think about Lebanon. When I get assigned work outside my scope, I know it’s good for my growth but it also shows me the truth about my career in wine: I only care about wine when I can see how it relates to home. My wine research is just an alternative way for me to bob on an anthropological raft and it makes me wonder how long I can fake this passion if it is just an identity crisis wrapped in homesickness. It makes me want to dive into work that has nothing to do with Lebanon but I worry that that is the only reason anyone is listening to what I have to say. And I worry that it’s the only reason I have anything to say at all.

This is the question I don’t have an answer to, one that keeps being whispered to me the longer I am away from Beirut. If I’m not talking or writing or researching about Lebanon, who am I? I want to pull the Mediterranean over my head like a duvet.

I keep wondering if this sense of belonging I can’t find here in America is my stubborn resistance to being at ease. It’s my rejection of this trade-off.

Maybe I’m not good enough for America. Maybe, America isn’t good enough for me. Either way, I’m going to stay in the sunshine a little longer.

It’s been almost a year since the Beirut Port Explosion. I have typed that sentence out again and again, changing the number value each time I revisit this draft.

After the blast, I read many thoughts and threads about the gap. The gap when you’re the only one at the table scrolling through posts on Palestine while others talk about patty melts and new Marvel films. The gap when you twitch because a Cessna flies overhead and it’s not a reason to move away from the windows. The gap that comes with seeing activists online screaming for all issues equally, except for those that relate to people who are like you. The gap that requires you to sing happy birthday to your parent over WhatsApp video and hold back tears because then they’ll worry about you while their world crumbles around them. The gap that has you lying to them about being okay so that they’re okay.

The gap is isolation in many forms.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be writing a cliche account of diaspora melancholy. Shut up, you are privileged to have crossed the rickety bridge. I don’t want to be the person who posts Gibran quotes and laments about the homeland from my work-from-home desk in Californian suburbia.

For the first time, I’m seeing what it’s like to be on the diaspora side of things with a sense of permanence. I’m experiencing the gap in new ways because I know that the next time I visit Lebanon, I will be on a timer. I don’t necessarily identify with the grand diaspora entity just yet. Months ago, while still in Beirut, a friend of mine described a separate category, a subset of the diaspora, made up of those who spent a chunk of their formative years in the region and left. This subset had a different interpretation of estrangement from home mixed with a deeper knowledge of the hardships of living there. This is not some form of exceptionalism, I am part of the diaspora in that I left but I was also born here. I’m not an immigrant but I’m not just the daughter of one either. Maybe it is all in how you position yourself in discussions about home: do you stand with your home country and face your new one or is it the reverse? Who is your “we” when you speak? Maybe you only truly become a member of the diaspora when you have crossed the rickety bridge and fully turned around to face home from the other side.

The Sarde After Dinner podcast interviewed singer & philosopher Rabih Salloum last week and he brought up a strong point regarding citizenship, belonging, and loyalties Lebanese have to those (zu3ama) who provide services and favors. Salloum said that, in reality, those “services” are basic rights and that there is no sense of ownership in Lebanese citizenry, but rather a feeling of being indebted to someone else in power for access to rights that should be a given.

A given.

I catch myself observing others like a perspicacious documenter. I make mental notes of things like how the city clocks listed on someone’s smartphone tell you where their loved ones are or how strangers are quick to introduce their dogs by name but don’t do the same with their own. What is a given here in the USA is what stands out most. In the past, when I used to travel from Lebanon, I would be reminded of what we lived without and what I had gotten accustomed to gradually the longer I was grounded there. Like the frog in the pot of water set to boil, when I landed in LA at the end of March 2021, it hit me all at once. I couldn’t grasp the level of depravity we had been subjected to for the 18 months prior, the slow simmer that incapacitated us to the point of revolting obedience.

When I try to explain that to people here, they want me to list the givens that they’re overlooking. “Sitting in the grass in the park, using stoves without replacing gas canisters, physical mailboxes, cashless everything, self-checkout, Lowe’s, potable tap water, public beaches with free parking, donuts.” They grin like a toddler just said the cutest thing and I wonder what picture I’m painting of Lebanon as a result of holding up such a mirror.

In the US, driving makes me anxious but it’s an unavoidable part of living in massive California. There is so much blind trust in the system and in each other. I’m almost envious of their faith that all fellow drivers will follow rules and this makes me more vigilant. What if I, the one who learned how to drive in Ouzai, turn out to be the rule-breaker and I put everyone else at risk? What if I’m the one who doesn’t understand consequence? And yet, my first thought is of consequence, not safety. Facing authority is my first concern. Getting pulled over, not getting rammed into. Avoiding police, not avoiding accidents.

I’m the one that should adapt even if the rules don’t make sense, even if bike lanes are a death wish, even if I can make the left turn, even if the light just turned yellow. I’m more passive, I stay 5 under the speed limit, and I apologize more even though I disagree with how things are done or don’t even understand the how at times. For how dare I question America, look at my other country. I should be grateful to be here.

Anthropologist Ghassan Hage, in his brilliantly-named blog, describes this as a “primal injury” and says this shrinking of the self results from, “the simple fact that unlike the local, the immigrant belongs to a country that could not care for them.”

I don’t want any trouble, just let me have my boring Sunday.

My departure from Lebanon doesn’t feel concrete but it creeps up on me during rudimentary tasks that are part of settling in. I realize that this isn’t happening anymore, it’s happened. Switching my WhatsApp number, filling out an Emergency Contact card and not writing my parents’ info, or even answering an Uber driver’s “so do you live here?”

Kinda, I mean I do. Yeah actually, I just moved back.

It feels like a lie but each one makes it more official and reminds me that “here” and “there” have been swapped in my sentences. I have a WhatsApp group of six friends. Five years ago, we were all still based in Lebanon. Today, we are each in different parts of the world while each corresponding set of parents remains in Lebanon. As of 2021, I had more friends who had moved to the US than I did left in Beirut.

Last week, I had a phone call with a friend who left Lebanon after we graduated from AUB. “You sound like yourself before the trauma,” he said. That felt like another lie but one I wanted to believe. The last time he saw me was in December 2020 when I was reeking of bitterness, fed up and on autopilot. And while I’m not as maudlin as I was then, I feel I’ve shed a skin and I’m not seeing the world with the same eyes as those used in 2019. “I know it sounds weird but I’m glad you won’t be there when I visit because I won’t have to leave you behind again when I go,” that same friend said. That wasn’t strange to hear and yet a similar statement of “it’s good you got out of there” sounds different coming from Americans, even the ones that claim to care about you. They’re right but it stings when they say it, as if everything they ever knew about the Middle East was true after all.

On July 4th, I pushed myself to leave my suburban sanctuary. On the day that is all about celebrating America, I woke up to memorial posts commemorating eleven months since the blast. Only after I got to the barbecue, did I find out that fireworks aren’t just for county parks and Disneyland anymore but they’re the centerpiece to this day’s bonanza on every block. After flinching and fidgeting every time a BOOM unknowingly erupted in daylight, I was hiding tears and I eventually disintegrated into a blubbering mess. I begged the only person who noticed not to sound the alarm. Please don’t let people see me as the broken Middle Easterner even if that’s exactly what I am. She attempted to comfort me by equating my PTSD response to war vets by saying, “others go through this, your experience is similar to theirs.” No, no, no. And in the flurry of American flags and racist rants, it wasn’t an 11-month anniversary for anyone else there and I was the only one not part of this America. There are many Americas.

I’ve had intrusive thoughts that I bury by repeating you’re here now, make it work. Lebanon is no longer a safety net. Going back home isn’t the option it used to be just like leaving wasn’t the choice it used to be. When I’m scrolling Twitter, I wonder if I’ve made a mistake and question if this is where I should be. You’re here now, make it work. What if I find out someone back home is in trouble and I need 24 hours to get to them? You’re here now, make it work. The most shocking one is that I want everyone to leave, I want them safe, I want them out. Out where they can take a hot shower without asking if there’s water, where they can go for a cruise on the highway without thinking about wasted fuel, where they can turn on the AC without needing to know iza dawle aw ishtirak. I want them out so I can do these things without feeling guilty that they can’t. You’re here now, make it work. I have to make this work because of what got me here, what made me leave, and what has now made it so I can only see my family for weeks out of the year.

I flirted with the idea of leaving Lebanon in 2017/2018 but I went back and I don’t regret it. I adopted a crusty Penny found in Qoreitem. I moved out on my own. A Better Beirut began. I launched B for Bacchus. I forgot about leaving for a while. I danced in Riad el Solh during the early days of thawra, I tagged the ground under the Martyrs statue, and I got teargassed in the Square with my sister after they blew us up. This last year in lockdown, as articles cited a lira depreciation percentage that kept increasing, I kept wondering if I would still care about Lebanon if everyone I cared for was gone. If it was not a dysfunctional place, would I still have this toxic attachment? If I moved for the sake of novelty and opportunity without the loss of home as I knew it, would I still have this fury inside me?

I keep reading things about leaving but then again, when something is on your mind, you see it everywhere. It is a hot topic when it comes to Lebanon’s survival mode though. Since high school graduation, any time I said that I was choosing to stay in Lebanon, it was dismissed because it was a choice not everyone had. After two decades there, I’ve been reduced to just another person that left because they could and it infuriates me. I have learned that the ability to leave silences any pain you have associated with the act because the mere option outweighs your misery and diminishes your solidarity. As long as you have that parachute, you are not the same.

Honestly, I don’t miss Lebanon yet. The memory of so many consecutive low days hasn’t washed away to the point where I can have dreamy illusions of our beautiful mountains and shaffeh coffee cups. Things have only spiraled further since I left and nostalgia, hopeful optimism, and unsolicited advice to locals from expats are all still irritating.

“To believe we are apathetic is to accept that we are deserving of all this — these fuel lines, these bread lines, these empty pharmacies and stolen bank deposits, this exploded port, and above all these vile and ruthless warlords — as punishment for that apathy.”

Lina Mounzer’s latest in L’Orient Today

The Port Explosion rattled me but it also set me in motion. Six months later, I was finally seeing a therapist after ferociously resisting help all my adult life. Lebanon is not falling off a cliff now, it’s already hit the water and it’s struggling against the undercurrent to come back up for air. My therapist, who helped me jump ship, is still there and now I feel I am selfishly holding onto a lifeguard who can’t swim. The current is tossing us both around but I’m wearing the life jacket. The rest of the world continues to spew brink of collapse spicy headlines, pushing our heads back under water when we’ve reached the surface to take a breath.

I think about Lebanon more than I hoped to and probably more than I should. Perhaps it is my own form of punishment: penance I feel I deserve for being able to buy Advil without thinking, fill my gas tank in 15 minutes, or tune it all out should I want to.

What I want is to surround myself with people who understand. People who don’t miss the anesthesia awareness but don’t allow the amnesia forgetfulness. Our baseline has been reduced to bas oxygen, merci so we are ashamed to want more than the bare minimum, even if we have left the crucible. What is this masochism? What has the love for Lebanon done to us all?

But I’m here now, I have to make it work.

Update: Ghassan Hage read this and wrote a response.

I take notes on my phone or in a Star Wars Moleskine gifted to me by Mo, a former-colleague-turned-friend. I have scraps of notes on napkins and post-its or recited to myself as voice memos. After August 4th, I typed out every new note as an Instagram post. All my thoughts were a discombobulated mess and I stitched them together publicly. The place that made us relive all the sorrow of that day was the same place I found others who were searching for words like the ones I was getting rid of. We bonded over all that was broken.

The “Beirut Blast” as it’s called today is why I haven’t written here since July. I couldn’t thread the needle to bring all those patches together. This will be an imperfect attempt but it’s not the year to be afraid of needles.

The other day, a friend said the beauty about coming from this part of the world is we don’t need to explain why everything is political because it just is. Even Tinder is political when half the profiles come from across a border that’s illegal to cross.

As their military jets violate our airspace on the regular, effectively taunting a population that doesn’t have the energy to protest a government who’s slowly killing them after instantaneous mass murder, I cannot fathom how our collective anxiety can ever subside. 

Do they not know how degraded we feel? Even if their recon drones don’t tell them, all you have to do is comb Twitter to see how we beg, if not for peace, then for quiet at the very least.

The soporific amnesia has started. It must be self-preservation that makes the country continue like we weren’t blown up. It makes me agitated. I don’t want to be ensorcelled by endless sadness but will burying it make the trauma decompose? Will taping over the footage because we need to function make us forever dysfunctional? 

On Jan 9, 2019, my dad was ranting in the car. He said, “I’m not very nationalist. Since my birth, they did nothing for me. They gave me nothing.” 

What they gave him, like many teenagers of the civil war era who share his detachment, is this supernatural talent to board up destroyed window frames as if the neighbor’s fly ball just flew into the living room. I have seen him switch in and out of crisis-mode so seamlessly. I was still hitting the floor in sheer disbelief after seeing the videos of the blast emerging on WhatsApp when he was ringing my doorbell, arriving to assess the damage. As impressive as it is, it makes me terrified to think what he has seen to have such a short lag time. 

It also makes me wary of transgenerational trauma when not given the chance to heal. Like Mikey Muhanna said in an afikra Conversation with Professor Jess Ghannam, “there’s no post, it’s just TSD. It’s CTSD, constant traumatic stress disorder.” Ghannam agreed and said that instead of approaching it like a disorder, it can be thought of as a normal adaptive reaction to awful things that gives you psychological antibodies. 

In an effort to reject this inherited ability to flip blank history pages, I’ve been walking through the streets of Mar Mikhael. This is a pattern of mine. After my first breakup, I repeatedly scratched at scabs by visiting the university campus where that relationship lived and died. It’s how I masochistically faced the ruins to reconcile my memories with the present. Instead of avoiding triggers, I tried to melt away any illusions that I could find false comfort in. For Beirut, the illusions are the kind that will create a dimension where the city wasn’t gutted, a place where none of that happened and I can still see transparent shards as just a shattered wine glass. 

That fugacious Fata Morgana will keep me here in the Beirut of my mind.

I went to Beit Chabeb with a hiking group at the end of 2019. “Hayde Beit Chabeb 2edemna bas ma ba2a fiya walla shab, kilon seyfaro*,” laughed the guide. Coming a few months after the start of our revolution that was deflating. The joke stung.

Around this time last year, before she left Lebanon, a friend told me she “wanted to hug the walls.” I fully understood that and envisioned the walls of the apartment building I had just moved out of.

In November 2018, when I had been living there for a few months, I wrote this note in my phone: I should close the shutters to block out the morning sun but I like to wake up to the birds returning to their nests in the bullet hole scars of my war time building. Sometimes in the shadow of destruction, there is new life sprouting like weeds growing in concrete cracks or birds’ nests in the gaping scars in the sides of buildings.

Just before I left that building, the birds did too. The landlord filled the holes with plaster. The issue with walls is they can’t hug you back and now even our walls have been viciously stolen.

In his latest Netflix documentary, David Attenborough said, “In this world, a species can only thrive when everything else around it thrives too.” 

I had previously made the assumption that I missed my friends the least because being the one at home meant I saw them most. Friends abroad needed to hope for an overlap in their yearly visits or a chance encounter in another city. But even being based in Beirut became less of a guarantee as their ties here loosened. I stopped feeling the gaps as they stretched from 6 months to 2 years to silence. 

I’ve stopped hugging them as tight when they get in their cars to the airport, I’ve stopped sending that safe-flight text before they switch to airplane mode, I’ve stopped attending farewells. The truth is I’ve stopped missing people altogether. I’ve become so numb to that sensation that it won’t register. I’ve stopped saying goodbye. 

At my first full-time job, I remember having a debate with Mo about why so many young people give up on Lebanon and leave. He responded, “But did they ever really try? What have they done for Lebanon?”

As a fresh grad, could you already know that you wanted more? That Lebanon wasn’t for you? I didn’t want to leave and have anyone tell me that I didn’t try. But more importantly, I didn’t want that to hang over my head. I wanted to be able to board a plane knowing that I had tried all the combinations but the safe wouldn’t open. And I did. I took breaks, came back, and tried another go at the safe. 

But any kind of safe isn’t easily accessed here.

The Who Run the World podcast recently interviewed artist Blu Fiefer about her single, Sint el Ew. She talked about these lines from the track: “I want to be happy, I want to be proud, I want to be capable.”

Over ten years of investing her time and resources into building herself up in Lebanon, she ends the song in exasperation with those words. In the interview she says, “but I’m trying, I’ve been trying…I want to be proud of where I am and what surrounds me and what I’m doing but you make that so difficult and you’re making me feel like it’s impossible. I just want to be happy and fulfilled.”

Before the blast, on July 19th, I wrote, “I find myself wrapped in bitterness and resentful reactions when I read hopeful words that I used to write. I don’t want to hate Lebanon. I don’t want to get to the point where I’d rather light a match and set the place on fire.”

I have told myself that if I was reaching the point of resentment, that was when I would need to leave. So many who left before me, did so with the taste of iron on their tongue. Internal fury and pain eating away at them, the airport gates couldn’t open fast enough. If I was ever to leave, I wanted to do it without rage.

I also wanted to be right about staying. I wasn’t naive in my hopes for the country and I wasn’t susceptible to abuse yet, here I was, repeatedly returning to my abuser. Even though I have accomplished so much and I have grown here, the process has beaten the fiery fight out of me.

While many are yearning to be near their families, I am making plans to leave mine. Although this confinement has made me more conscious of their value, I am weighed down by isolation. Lebanon has been likened to the sinking Titanic and, emotionally, I feel like I am floating on a door in the ocean with no remaining lifeboats in the vicinity. If I can keep my head above the water long enough as the rest of the world goes on without us, I can make it to another shore because I’m lucky enough to have a way out.

After pouring myself into Beirut, I’m leaving without rage. I am leaving empty.

I have a tattoo across my rib cage that says لبنان بقلبي. I chose these words because I knew the sentiment was a permanent one but perhaps it was a premonition. I’ve accepted that being Lebanese means grief is part of our existence but I didn’t know that it was going to be for the memory of a city instead of the city itself.

This latest wave of emigration is beyond expected and I can’t shake this sense of abandonment. Not because I can save Lebanon — I can’t. But leaving years ago wouldn’t feel final like it does now. A departure from this Lebanon is an ending because I don’t know what the country will look like when I return. With the state of the world, I don’t know when that return will be. Saying goodbye now is saying goodbye to this version of Beirut that I have in my mind but even she doesn’t exist anymore.

But then again, I’ve stopped saying goodbyes.

_{*This is Beit Chabeb (home of young men) but there are no men left, they have all traveled}

We recently watched Lucien Bou Rjeily’s Heaven Without People and one line keeps playing in my head since: Lebanon changes you. And it wasn’t said to refer to the obvious ways living in a particular country affects you. Lebanon changes you because you become too resilient. Too malleable. Too resourceful. It becomes your default. It sinks your standards. Your baseline for the bare minimum morphs into 3al 2aleele 3aysheen.

The rot is so much deeper than the sulta alone.

It’s us too. It’s become our factory-setting of how to maneuver, how to bribe, how to cheat the thieving system that owes us. The end justifies the means and the green that lines the pockets of those who taught us how to sew them. It will take generations to unravel that thread when we haven’t even stitched the wounds. We are not a nation. We, the youth, are no different than the war generation when there has been no healing. We have inherited that brokenness and pain. Don’t you feel it?

At 32, my ambition has calmed just in time for me to find out that, as we approach the economic bottom, I am not self-sufficient and my independence was a facade that has burned away like a nitrate filmstrip left in a hot room with no generator in August. I worry that leaving would require breaking ground on an open dig site while I’ve spent the last 10 years building my Cinema Paradiso here. But it is being demolished and I’m questioning where the Nuovo should be constructed. I keep thinking I can make it work here but then I have to ask myself how and the answers feel like cement blocks tied to my ankles. I love Lebanon so much that it makes me grind my teeth when I break down in tears but anything that could anchor me here instantly makes me feel like I’m swimming to the surface as those same cement blocks sink.

If x is the effort you put into a project, x in Lebanon will equal 1 whereas x elsewhere will equal 12. My friend tells his wife, “wanting to stay, it’s emotional” when she says she doesn’t want to be away from her parents. Reason will point you to immigration papers. To the airport. To somewhere you can build. Somewhere with no guarantee but somewhere you can have a chance.

Why do I want to stay here? So I can out-weasel and distrust anything that is supposed to serve me? So that I don’t just expect disappointment but feel discomfort without it? So that I can watch my home disintegrate from inside a see-through shell? So that I age faster and live lonelier for the future family I cannot fathom? That I cannot find? That I do not want because the existence of anyone beyond myself means I cannot be here?

What is keeping me here?
What has kept me here?
Was I wrong to stay?

You don’t need to make me an offer I can’t refuse. It’s not about greener grass when we have no green and no grass. But how do I walk away? How do I not apply pressure where the bullet went in? How do I let her bleed out? Can I save her? Why do I think I can?

Is she the one who’s dying?
Or is it all of us?

I’m not sure but 3al 2aleele 3aysheen.*

*At least we’re alive

I used to say it was what made us skilled at maneuvering socially and professionally. I used to believe in that narrative too. That being resilient was a strength that made you innately resourceful because nothing worked the way it was expected to, because your baseline was a failed system you could not depend on. Being resilient meant you had a backup, you knew how to wiggle out of a jam, you knew how to overcome.

What you allow is what will continue.

How did they trick us? How did they convince us to take pride in this quality to the point where we use it in our elevator pitches and interviews on our questionable ability to succeed against all odds? How did they manage to flip their failure into something we excel in so well that we want to keep doing it?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we shouldn’t use adversity to our advantage. But why do we revel in the masochism and smirk at our unrelenting willingness to adapt?

The Lebanese take a certain sad pride in their fate, pointing out that no other country could take such a beating and still function, even in such an odd fashion. The paradox is that the qualities that enable the Lebanese to survive – the close clan ties and the unremitting ability to wheel and deal – are the very things that are tearing the country apart.

“Life Among the Ruins in Beirut“ by John Kifner for The New York Times

That archived article from December 1981 cited the same romanticism of the past mixed with the awe of how the Lebanese manage to keep the engines running when all signs point to rusted gears. Just because we can find a way to breathe as the water fills the sinking ship, does that mean we let the captains steer us into every iceberg? Even when you know they’ll be the first on the life raft while you’ve drowned or you’re left out to sea?

Being resilient is the propaganda our government sold us for decades. They managed to get us to flaunt our ability to keep taking their shit and turn it into a phoenix rising from the ashes. We voted in the same parasites and sang about the country being rebuilt again and again and again. We applauded our expats abroad. We pushed our youth out the doors. We gave them away only to see what they could’ve done at home if they weren’t busy being resilient. We accepted less than we deserve as humans of a so-called nation and instead of asking them why, we said we are resilient.

Well, I am tired of being resilient.

There’s a tightness in my chest. It’s not the virus (I hope) but more likely a cocktail of anxiety and allergies emerging as the weather shifts again. I spend my days drawing out the skeleton for the week. I fill the pages with golden eggs that seem to be popping out of me like a broken gumball machine.

The heartache of my early twenties taught me that my coping mechanism is to drown myself in work. It’s not a denial of emotions but a denial of their power. If I can keep my fingertips moving and creating maybe I won’t feel at every moment I am breathing. Maybe I won’t feel the intense claustrophobia where the walls are my country’s borders. Maybe I won’t feel the heaviness of my parents’ questions of what to do now that their sandcastles are being washed away. Maybe I won’t feel the impending hyperventilation that accompanies the need for more protests. Maybe I won’t feel the tightness in my chest.

I’m hanging on to this space in between, trying to stretch it out like proofed dough so that I can make more. There needs to be enough so that I am full for days, so that I am fulfilled for hours, so that I am satiated for just a bit longer. So that I am in control.

This space in between where there is no time, no goals, and no pants.
This space in between where screens are just another window with lifeforms on the other side. Can you see me?
This space in between a governmental’s collapse and its reincarnation.
This space in between my deodorant and the whiff of a stranger’s cologne.
This space in between every inhale and exhale.

In this space in between, I watch Tim Burton films and let the Danny Elfman scores coat my consciousness. Misfits shrouded in a gothic palette existing in whimsical settings that don’t know how to hold them. I have felt detached from the ground, from the fight, from the belief that there still is one. I’m an observer in a glass sphere rolling over the streets. What weight keeps me here? Is the place out there still mine? Or am I trapped in the space in between? Is this where I’ve been all along?

Until I figure out the answers, I’ll sit here gazing through the looking glass.

For the last 6 months, I felt like I was in a daze. From the economy to the lira to the environment to the emigration, every grain that fell through the hourglass was another piece of the country collapsing. Lebanon was disintegrating. It felt like we were suspended in gelatin, unsure of what was waiting for us after the new year, unsure of what was to come with every parliament meeting, unsure of where we were supposed to put our faith except in the hands of one another.

In February of 2020, I had gone for a walk in downtown. It dawned on me how my own feelings towards the beginning of the uprisings had shifted from that of euphoria to utter exhaustion.
I wanted to keep protesting.
I wanted to feel that high again.
I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t succumbing to the fake detente, the rain, the strain, all the impediments that the government was counting on. How I felt that first week in October was nothing like the dumbbell sitting on my chest. I didn’t know how to lift it for one last rep. I had fallen in the mud under the monkey bars and my inner coach was berating me because there was still the rest of the obstacle course ahead. I wanted to crawl away. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. Maybe I wasn’t an activist, I was a privileged fraud. Maybe the doubters who thought this was pointless were right. Maybe I didn’t know what we signed up for when I went to Riad el Solh on the 18th, that Friday morning that I wouldn’t believe happened if I didn’t have the pictures to prove it.

To go through my phone’s photo album is another obstacle course. It’s exercises for my emotions. I scroll through a sea of Lebanese flags that get thinner as the days pass and I lose more of the sense of control over the days that haven’t been logged yet. The more I scroll, the harder the wave hits. The crash of suffocation, of lost direction, of wanting to check-out without guilt.

With the virus taking hold of the planet, the limbo that Lebanon had been suspended in has become the global pandemic’s main symptom infecting our entire species. We are all crippled by anxiety and fear that someone we love will die. We are all learning how to cope with plans becoming a word we don’t use anymore. We are all taking it one day at a time and hanging onto whatever piece of normal we can find in the dark.

We are all just trying to adapt and figure out a way through. To where, no one knows. We just know that through is the only way forward. And, in a way, because the whole world is now somersaulting in this darkness with me, I feel less alone.

I say “as a woman” when I can’t but you can
which makes me feel like I’m admitting
it’s because I’m not a man.

The only time I’ll get a “Mabrouk” is if things are entering or exiting the gap between my legs. The gap that keeps me from bringing home the bread, not the baked, but the dough that keeps me fed, that leaves me on read, that keeps me reaching for those Mabrouks that are given to him instead because they aren’t meant for women who talk about rights while shoving thighs into tights and I pluck and I pry and I cry and I dye and I die a little inside every time you look at me like I could be…more.

•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•*•
It’s an endless fight, this being-a-woman thing, but I’m so proud to do it with all of you. Happy International Women’s Day my ferocious & feisty ones ✊🏼#IWD2020

I haven’t given up. I believe change is here, this revolution will continue. But I didn’t discover my belief in Lebanon as of October 17th.

My belief is rooted in the little nothings. In “Allah!” when someone trips. In the “khalilna ndayfik shi” as you’re buying a kilo of cucumbers. In the “zeiteitna atyab,” be it from your Southern teammates or the Northern competition. Old houses eaten by moss and sunshine. The light. Oh, the light. In the “yen3ad 3aleikon” that means may you get to experience this again. It’s a wish for the return of an annual celebratory moment in time. As lives are often measured in milestones, it’s a veiled wish for longevity. What a sentiment to bestow upon someone so simply.

It’s not just the food, it’s the flavors in between. The taste of Fantasia 3a ketchup, the chili paste on the kaak with Picon, the radish slice in your hummus, the molasses on your sfiha, the crispy minced garlic in the batata b’kozbra, the toasted nuts in your rice, the grilled tomatoes on the skewer, kariche, the leftover sumac-dotted sauce of your fattouche, the cherries in fishna, the toum, the toum, the toum.

These little nothings have been my saving grace when I am sinking under the weight of what Lebanon fails to give me. They become more pronounced during the holidays and I’ve made an effort to mentally log them as I scramble to hang onto a handrail in our latest episode of uncertainty.

For every steel façade, I will give you walls of peeled paint and layers of torn event posters. For every shortcoming, I will give you an initiative to create A Better Beirut. For every paid-off voter, I will give you a volunteer fighting for the community in crisis. For every traffic jam, I will give you a side-street with walkable stories. For every hour without power, I will give you one at a table with such warm conversation that you won’t notice it’s by candlelight.

When our president dared us to emigrate, my reaction wasn’t an automatic, unwavering “too bad, I’m staying.” It was a whispered, “maybe I should leave.” The question of staying here is one that has simmered behind my eyeballs daily for the last decade. But now, with a new Lebanon on the rise while the current one is still digging its talons into our shoulders, thoughts of leaving aren’t voiced for fear that you’ll come off as a traitor to the cause or less invested in the revolution. Shaming you quite audibly, your internal voice of guilt chimes in: “You don’t want this badly enough to stay. You don’t care.“

I feel forced out. Forced to be responsible with my potential and privilege rather than selfless yet unnecessarily sacrificial. The furious righteousness of those who stay is countered by the mumbled resentment of those who leave. Both are mechanisms to cope with decisions we take and feel the need to justify, either way. “How can I rebuild a Lebanon if doing so leaves me in ruins? I can make it, I can get by. But why should I actively choose that for myself? Who will that serve? The future generations! But what about mine?“

I’ve typed versions of these words here since 2012. When the realization that our movement’s gestation would be closer to 9 years rather than 9 months, I had to revisit the words and consider what this national shift in consciousness meant for me on an individual level. “Do I need to hemorrhage during my prime to prove my dedication to the country I had chosen over and over again? Who am I proving it to anyway?“

It feels like the regret of not leaving sooner may outweigh the regret of not being here to witness every part of the transformation even if I vehemently want this transformation to happen.

Lebanon is a young nation and she still has some growing to do. Unfortunately, so do I.