Georgios: “Good idea.”
“Did you hear me? Was I speaking out loud? Oh God, I lost my internal world!”
Zumurrud: “You’re losing it again.”
It was a busy and delicious day off.
Arak, hummus, tabbouleh, and kebabs of course. But there was also organic cheese, lamb kafta with yogurt, potato and rice kibbeh, and dandelion salad. Should I keep going? No, that’s enough. All this talk of food is giving me a stomachache.
What was important is that we were renewed, heart and mind, at that lunch with a magical view of Sannine. The view stretched across the horizon, removing all the boundaries of buildings and narrow streets and daily noises. The view was lovely in green, blue, and gray. It was calming.
During lunch, I felt like I was in a commercial for tourism. Was I supposed to jump for joy and wear a tarboosh to show my happiness and ethnicity at the same time? No, I stayed calm.
In any case, the meal that moved off the table and into my stomach is keeping me from moving. I’m going to surrender myself to Shwikar’s comfortable couch instead.
I’m alone at her house because she’s at her parents’.
I open my laptop.
Woohoo! Finally a message from her.
I have a friend who lives in Paris. She called me a couple of months ago to tell me about a love she had found at a metro station, but that it did not evolve beyond him letting her get off the train before him.
I asked her if she happened to forget her brain on that train. She laughed and told me that she’s been living love stories of this kind, suspended in the air, woven from the imagination, nourished by passing glances and kindness.
Her stories weren’t this hypothetical before. In love, she was a professional, even before reaching a first-name basis. But recently she’s been feeling suffocated and depressed, which I’m hoping is only a phase. She told me that she has despaired of the human race and from having sex with its people, after having “tried” its men and women, the old and the young, Arab and foreign, believers and blasphemers, extremists and moderates. She said she knew as many men and women as the fish in the sea, and her experiences have led her to despair of the entire human race. It’s dull. Why? Because people are predictable, and their actions are predictable; nobody surprises her anymore. She said she sets traps for people to fall into. She places every one of them in a situation anticipating the result, and she watches and judges their performance.
“Seriously, can’t one of them surprise me?”
“Do you really want to be surprised?”
“Yeah.”
“Then give people a chance.”
She laughed and quickly changed the subject.
Today, she finally does what I’ve been asking her to do and emails me letting me know how she’s doing and what she’s been up to, not answering all my questions with, “nothing new,” as she usually does. She writes to me in French:
Bonjour Sitt Boudour,
There are two websites I insist on visiting every night aside from my email and Facebook account. The first is a Lebanese website, the National News Agency. I check it, read news of Lebanon, from the simplest to its most complex and from the most important to its most trivial. Every silly piece of news speaks of a silly person. Like an article that tells of someone who traveled to Athens to participate in conference such-and-such. I wonder why this person finds traveling important enough to send word of it to some news agency to announce to the nation and the world? The problem is he probably has connections, both known and secret, that enable this piece of news to be published over and over again. And so, on a daily basis, I discover people who make me laugh.
But, few are the amusing local news pieces and many are the disturbing ones, like the mere existence of politicians, their statements, and news of conferences that cover everything from the environment to children and drugs to religion. Most of these conferences have no purpose at all. This person attended them, that person saw something, and that other person confirmed some other thing, and words words words. The only purpose behind them is funding: an NGO has national funding with which it wants to start a project that deals with the youth for example, so, let there be a conference! I get so bored—dead bored—every time I come across a conference discussing “the reinforcement of the role of the youth.” I hate my job in NGO even though it’s in Paris.
And there is the kind of news that makes me cry. I read a news article yesterday that paralyzed me:
In a statement to the NNA, a security delegate stated that he found four dead bodies inside the home of so-and-so around 7:30 this evening, located in the such-and-such area near Baabda and Bekfaya. The four bodies found in the bedroom belonged to a mother (40 years of age) and her three daughters (13, 10, and 7), and they had food next to them. The security forces were on site waiting for the medical examiner to examine the bodies and determine the cause of death.
End of article.
How can a person deal with this kind of news, go to sleep, and find the strength to wake up?
The second website I insist on visiting, obsessively, is the Interpol website.
Oui, that’s right, Interpol.
I can read it in four languages if I want: Arabic, English, French, or Spanish. The official language is English, but it cannot (ha!) ignore other foundational languages, mine included, which my people and your people consider “dead.” But if it were really dying, Interpol wouldn’t have written in it. If it were really dead, Interpol would’ve written news on it
