“Excuse me!”
Buzz off! Or yet, I’ll leave.
“Bye! Be careful on the road.”
Where to now?
I call Zeezee. She’s on her laptop in a café next to my apartment in Hamra. She’s working at lightning speed to finish a graphic design project for one of her clients who always gives Zeezee overdue projects to finish, emphasizing that the due date is “yesterday.” And the pay doesn’t include the little time Zeezee has to finish the job. In fact, the client doesn’t reimburse her for the many phone calls she has to make either, and her wrecked nerves, and the almost literal tug-of-war she gets caught in each time. Goddamn freelancing jobs in Lebanon.
I resolve to join her work session when, suddenly, everything changes. One moment changes the course of my life.
I receive a text message from a news service that charges me ten dollars a month to send me news headlines, saying: “The Cairo National Airport closed down due to a two-day sandstorm.”
I quicken my pace toward the café. I snatch the laptop from Zeezee’s hands without an explanation. Zeezee looks worried and nervous. I access the Agence Nationale website and look through its few international news headlines.
I read the article then return the laptop to the still-stunned Zeezee. She asks what’s wrong, but I don’t answer. I take out my cell phone and call the Beirut International Airport. I wait for an agent to answer then ask whether the news is true. It is, so I cancel my flight.
“I’m not going on vacation anymore.”
“Why don’t you push your flight back a little?”
“Because my flight got cancelled and there must be a good reason behind it. I have to stay in Lebanon for a while. I have to stay here. This is a sign. I can feel it. I just know it.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Yeah.”
“Fine. Should we cancel the party?”
“Cancel the party? Isn’t what just happened a legitimate reason to drink?”
“Yeah, your stupidity is a better reason. I’m going to have fun teasing you tonight.” She laughs.
“And a flawed person criticizing me is proof of my perfection.”
“Okay, Kamel al-Sabbah.”
“Television is the best invention ever.”
“No, the remote control is.”
“True.”
So, I’m not traveling anymore.
But why did the course of my life have to change?
It changed because I’m writing the novel, that’s why.
I dived into writing the novel with all the information I’ve gathered in my lifetime.
I felt the need to let go of my information and notes and diaries. And I felt safe letting go.
I think I wanted to travel to try to create a new story for myself that I could turn into a novel; a world that’s far from my daily life but part of it like a journey that forms a moment in life.
I think I was afraid to narrate my life in Lebanon because I’m afraid of how it would end. My life could end along with the novel, the story of a life that multiple bodies collaborate to make. The ending of this novel must bring an end to something in my life.
And because of my fear of endings, I’ve been running away from them. Many stories in my life remained unresolved, without an ending, like the Lebanese civil war.
And now, I feel the need to face what I’ve been running away from: endings.
Now, I feel something new inside me. Like I’m ready to accept the end of this story and to start creating a new one.
It’s like I trust myself to negotiate with life now, whereas before I was careful to strictly be on the receiving end of life.
It’s the sandstorm: as if life is preventing me from running away, and encouraging me to face it and collaborate in writing my story.
I steal a deep breath that reaches my stomach and brings tears to my eyes. I won’t give in. I won’t go back to the pessimism of my younger years. I’m a thirty-year-old adult now, and talking is good enough for me: saying, revealing, tossing language whenever it feels right, knowing that my friends will be there to catch it and place it in the right context, and understand it, then tell me about our tomorrow, just as I do when life hurts them.
32.
I grab my phone and call them, one after the other, one after the other.
I ask them to go out with me and tell them that I need it because I’m fragile and need to strengthen my foundation.
I’d never experienced a party like that in my entire life.
They lit up the sky for me. I revealed to them reasons that kept me from writing, and they told me of all that makes us happy and sad, and that that’s what life is about, and that it’s normal to feel like I do. They told me that we ingest a lot of accumulated death and violence on a daily basis in Lebanon. They told me that every day we are exposed to different attacks by different faces for different causes that we thought were gone for good, but they haven’t left at all; these faces just pretend to be pretty instead, just pretend that they’ve changed. They told me that we have to deal with a lot of things we pretend don’t exist here, and so we learn to fear life. They told me that what I feel is normal. And they laughed at our concept of “normal.” Then they laughed at themselves. And of course, the evening ended with them laughing at me. We laughed at me a lot.
They offer to drive me home but I insist on walking. My apartment is ten minutes away from the restaurant. Isn’t that awesome? That’s one of the perks of the newly revived nightlife on Hamra Street.
They insist. I insist. I say goodbye, and walk away.
I think.
I’m like a house with two televisions. One in the bedroom and the other in the living room. I save the channels, but I mix up the televisions, I get the numbers wrong. Sixteen is the comedy channel in the
