sixteen

02:10:09

I’m sleepless and on my way back to Beirut.

While I was waiting in line to board the plane, I noticed a young couple just ahead of me. He was clearly Lebanese, and she, an assumption I made once I heard her speak, was French. She kept on running her fingers through his hair, kissing his ears, his cheeks, so on and so forth. The Arab business man standing in between us ran out of spots to look away at. I smiled at the thought of what he must have been thinking.

I thought of Hugg. He had proposed to meet me at the airport, and I had to refuse his offer, because I had already asked somebody else to come and pick me up. I wished I hadn’t. I imagined myself coming out, seeing his smile, looking away, smiling, and letting my bags drop to the floor so I could hug him. I would be home again.

Wow. Did I just write that? Excuse my mush.

I am not particularly fond of mush, and when things ended with Mr. Keller, I explained it as my inability to handle him and his mush. The mush factor was so strong, that it was close to becoming a third person in our relationship, the golden tip of a love triangle.

Mr. Keller was a gentleman. He would leave the car, walk around it and open the door for me. He would stand up when I’d leave or come to sit at the table. He would settle the bill. He would hold the door open for me. He would call me “lovely”.

To be honest with you, I found the whole spectacle to be over the top. There has to be a limit somewhere, and I felt that somehow, somewhere, he had crossed it. It made me feel uncomfortable. Maybe I didn’t feel I was the kind of woman who deserved all those grand gestures? Maybe I was used to a wrong way of being treated? Or maybe he was just flat-out weird?

But this must be said: better a gentleman, than a pig.

Speaking of pigs…

How would you feel if you were taking a romantic evening walk and suddenly heard the gorgeous man you were walking with pass wind? You might raise an eyebrow, frown or even chuckle; shit happens, we’re human after all.

How would you feel if that same person farted again?

How would you feel if the entire evening walk was punctuated with little rectal explosions?

He failed to apologize, and instead explained that his doctor had recommended him to let it all out, “Better out than in”, he said.

Wasn’t that a quote from Shrek?

How would you feel like if the exclamation mark of that evening, the highlight of the walk, was him unzipping his pants and peeing into a flower pot in the middle of Achrafieh?

And how would you explain your presence next to such a pig? How could you have ended up with someone like that in the first place?

Appearances can be deceiving. The pig I have just described to you was no one other than Clooney. Yes, the very same Clooney with the suave walk and talk. The very same Clooney who had made romantic literature come to life only a night before. Yet, there he was, acting half my age, fourth his age, farting, pissing, yanking out his beeper thing (or whatever little device it is that updates the pocket owner with soaring and plummeting stock rates) and shouting at the top of his lungs that he had “to buy gold, now!”, letting me know that he had “slept with all those whores at Shah” and then ramming his tongue down my throat in the middle of a busy intersection. Oh, oh, that’s not even it. The overly nice (that episode put an end to it) person that I was, I dropped him off to his car, while he kept on inviting me back to his place, “Don’t worry, we will not have sex” and I kept on refusing. When we finally arrived, he asked me for the final time, I said “NO!”, and he called me "rude".

For a month now, and exactly a year after I last saw him, I’ve been seeing his delicious car candy parked outside his workplace, the only one in the street, absorbing the black of the late night sky and reflecting the yellow of the overhead street lights.

And I wonder, whether the window in his office has been left open...

And I hope, for his and her sake (probably another “whore” from Shah), that he had quit smoking and she hadn’t taken it up for this particular occasion to appear seductive, because surely the entire building would burst in a violent blast if someone were to strike a match in their room.

And I would be the only one aware that the wind wasn’t capable of carrying the heavy aroma of the Qarantina slaughterhouse all the way to the middle of Downtown. I would be the only one in the know.

PS – How would you explain this 360degree change of character?