First Week Back

• After being used to anonymity abroad, bump into 3 people you weren’t planning on seeing every time you walk out the door. In sweatpants.
• Return to your hotspots. Uncle Deek Nescafé and a walk down the corniche, Jerry’s gin followed by Barbar’s shawarma, and Cantina for a midday red and shanklish. Beirut hotspots have a shelf-life of 3-4 months, making the crowd a seasonal hoard of lemmings that rotate between the same locations that have changed names.
• Become a lemming and check out the coffeeshop in Gemmayzeh that’s the new Kalei that was the new Urbanista that was the new Cafe Younes. HA, no one is like Younes.
• Redownload Tinder and swipe. Send too many Barry White GIFs.
• Commit all possible traffic violations while cursing every relative you’ve never met but are probably related to.
• Party with your people and remember what that feels like in a place like Lebanon, a country that suspects its Prime Minister is being puppeteered by Saudi Arabia, has an estimated 2 million refugees, and hasn’t had a census since the 30s. It’s not supposed to work but it’s perfect and thus, perfectly Lebanese.
• Listen to Enta Omri on your drive home after said party and think, shit, she was baller even though you can’t understand 60% of the song. Vow to visit Oum el Dounia* before you have a family and kids.
• Swipe on Tinder. Download Bumble.
• Catch yourself two-stepping through the alcohol section of Wesley’s whenever Havana plays on the loudspeaker. Remember that dadboss will laugh at the security camera footage in an hour.
• Smile when you think of all the money you’re saving because Amazon Prime doesn’t exist here.
• Begin planning New Year’s Eve with the returning expats across the globe because, despite being gone for 6 months, you are the only one rooted in Beirut.
• Try to write a blogpost. Sounds like all your previous pieces about returning home but with less feeling, less attachment, less love. It doesn’t feel true. Or it is and you don’t want it to be. Scrap the draft.

Second Week Back

• Start to see that although Beirut traffic is as bad as LA traffic, in Beirut, you’re only traveling a distance of 4km and it’s all potholes.
• Try to fill up on black coffee, moringa tea, and water so as to avoid the ever-expanding waistband that accompanies manaeesh and turkey season. Fail miserably when spicy spinach pies from Faysal suspiciously appear on your kitchen table.
• Celebrate Lebanon’s annual existential crisis, also known as Independence Day, by eating too much mezza and working late so people can buy pumpkin spice and cranberry sauce for their Friendsgiving dinner the next day.
• Run out of people on Bumble. Delete Tinder.
• Start reading the Los Angeles newsletters of events you’re missing back in California. Peruse culture-heavy events in Beirut as a reaction. You will find ways to love her again.
• Go back to complaining about $7 parking for dinner at a 5-star hotel even though you were easily paying double that in Santa Monica on a Monday to have frozen yogurt.
• Begin losing socks in the family laundry machine.
• Stop using the driving playlist used on the 118 in LA. Beirut needs more Godsmack.
• Tell yourself to focus at work. Keep your head down, pause, and look up only to see that December is all, “I need 5min, I’ll miss call you” and you’re still in a towel.
• Write a blogpost that captures the humorous albeit depressing emotions that now accompany returning to the only place that gets you to write with raw intensity.

In the midst of the mental noise, the only soothing voice is Fayrouz’s. Now you understand why cabbies and chauffeurs, or anyone sentenced to prolonged periods on the streets of Beirut, play her melodies all morning. It makes you wonder how many lives she’s saved, from the pedestrians on the Raouche promontory to the bus drivers of Charles Helou. It may be that exact memory of rainy drives to school that lowers your blood pressure; that illusion that you’re in the puffy anorak with loose feathers poking out, the gray clouds so thick they could hold you, and there’s a phantom smell of zaatar.

You don’t live here, you survive.
It could be that the secret to living here is staying in the passenger seat.

Oum el Dounia* = translates to “Mother of the Universe/World,” a nickname given to Egypt, home of the late singer Oum Koulthoum.