ninety-one

18:22:13

I’m sleepless in Beirut, the sun setting behind me.

I’m excited about tonight. There will be the cool evening breeze, the smell of jasmine, the buzz of conversations and the promise of laughter, cheer and unknown faces.

My skin is still warm from the sun and slightly gluey with sunscreen. Earlier, as I was rubbing it on to the objections of Foux, my tanorexic friend, I breathed in the memory of Botticelli and I at the beach. It was one of the very few times we had left his apartment together. I can count them on one hand. Yet now, I’m about to run out of fingers to bend – over nine months have passed since we’ve last spoken.

He had called me up one day, maybe a week after our second meeting since my return from Paris, to tell me that he wanted to cut things off between us. Completely. Not even for the time being. And I knew he was stubborn, but I didn’t expect this. For over half a year I would feel uneasy at the slight thought of him. I feared bumping into him, and I thanked heavens he was a social recluse. It was only that one night in Hamra, as I was walking with friends on the main street, past Madinat Theatre, that I saw him standing on the curb, his heavy leather bag tugging on his shoulder, his face in musing contemplation as he watched the traffic and people go by. I felt a heavy blow to my chest and grabbed my friend by her elbow.

“Do not look to your right, just keep on walking, just keep on walking,” I said clenching my teeth.

She didn’t question me and only when we had reached the church I told her that I had just seen Botticelli. I wondered whether he had seen me and I wonder whether he had felt a similar blow. Secretly I wished the sight of me would melt his heart and I kept checking my phone…

There are days when I wish I could just call him up like I used to and share with him snippets of life and observations that I know he would appreciate. And if those months ago he had felt rejected, how I was I supposed to feel? I hadn’t but refused to indulge in what had made my relationship with him torturous (and I guess, for him, worthwhile?). He blamed me for being dishonest, for having changed and I just didn’t want to take things in a direction that didn’t feel right. When we had first met, all I wanted was to be with him, and he would just retreat like plastic from fire until I’d fall into the trap of accepting the unspoken terms, over and over again. We would meet every so and so, but the breaks in between were necessary for him, and then eventually for me, until I grew out of the idea that this was what I could handle. In simple terms, I couldn’t be present physically, if he wasn’t there for me continuously. And to think I rejected him…

And then to hear Red say, “I love your smell. You smell the same way you did all those years ago. Oh, and your freckles, I love them too.” And he was referring to the unsightly sunspots on my shoulders!

We were now sitting side by side on the 62^nd floor, at the end of the U-shaped couch that held all our childhood friends.

“Don’t go,” I pleaded with him “Stay with me. You can always go on this trip another time, but who knows when I’ll be back!”

When I placed my hand on his inner arm to stroke his soft hairs, he smiled, “You know you have this power over me!”

I didn’t want to corner him, but I was dying to hear him say he chose me.

“Fine, I won’t go. But we’ll spend time together, yes?!”

I explained my situation, that I would have to see more of my family before traveling, and he understood and still, he didn’t go.

By the end of the night, we were five. Red, Flutterby, two boys and I – the original crew! Downstairs at the cabstand, we decided to head over to my place to keep the night going.

I was so touched to see these grown friends sit in the candlelight of my porch, flirting, conversing, but I was most happy to just have Red, sometimes in the kitchen, and sometimes by my side.  By five in the morning, at the sound of the first adhan, the boys were getting ready to head home; the cab would arrive in minutes.

I signaled to Red that he could stay over, that I wanted him to stay over, but I didn’t want to insist to a crowd of candlelit faces.

As soon as he was out the door, I texted him, “I still don’t get why. What’s wrong with sleeping over? What’s wrong with a pajama party? Pillow fight? (note the innocent terms)”

“Nothing is wrong, but I can’t with your family there, plus Flutterby, doesn’t feel right.”

“You think too much. You think too far. It would’ve been nice to have a 5hr hug.”

“Ok I’m coming”

Power to my power, I wanted to do a victory dance! Within minutes, he was back at the door, still hesitant, still anxious and still over-thinking.

“What if your mom sees me?!”

My argument was that nothing was going to happen, that my mom was a fellow human being and that we weren’t kids anymore.

I felt slightly guilty that I had brought Red into Flutterby’s and my sleepover, but I just kept hoping she’d remember the previous night when she had proposed the same scenario herself. In the end, I knew she would understand that I needed this.

“You just slept?!”, she later asked “Why didn’t you just let it happen?!”

In my room, with the skies brightening, he sat on the edge of the bed to remove his shoes, his shirt, “Do you have a T-shirt?”, he asked, and I thought “There is no way you’re going to wear a T-shirt with this body!”, to take off of his jeans, “Do you have shorts?”, and I let him have his shorts, the same shorts we were obliged to wear to the gym in high school, the same shorts I once tipex-ed with obscenities (along with a covert egg in his gym shoes) and was punished with that same egg at high-speed to the back of my head.

“No kissing,” I said.

It was the best sleep I had in a very long time.

eighty-eight

21:11:11

I’m sleepless on flight 419, overlooking pitch black Iraq from Saudi air space.

I hate that I have to clench my jaw and look up into the white light in order to stop the tears from rolling into my mouth and causing salt burn. The food is tasteless, but luckily I’ve just been handed my glass of wine. I badly want to exhale a destructive cloud of gray. It’s alright – Beirut is near.

The last time I remember being this sad was when I got on my first ever flight – I was nine years old and moving to an alien country I knew peanuts about. All I could think of was, “I don’t want to leave! I don’t! The first chance I get – I am coming back!” But that never happened. I lived in the UAE for over a decade. And now I was devastated to leave it for my adopted home.

Writing the above comforts me. Maybe the sadness I feel now is the inevitable closing of another chapter in my life. Besides feeling sad about leaving behind friends that remember my teenage awkwardness, or my family that I never give enough back to, or my high school sweetheart, I am probably most anxious about leaving this comfort zone, which I so easily dismissed as a punishment, a prison throughout all these years, for an uncertain future. It seems to me that a week spent in 40 degree centigrade captivity, awakened a sort of longing for sand storms, moral handcuffs and shopping malls. I reluctantly packed my suitcase; my only retaliation was my signature tardiness. I made it just in time for the check-in.

I am pitching myself the idea that the best is yet to come, that everything will fall into place, that I will take the right steps forward and the right steps backward and that I will end up in a place where I am meant to be – or a place that caters to my inner peace and my hungry spirit.

I am pitching myself the idea that this sadness stems from the fact that I was tempted to choose the easier option, the more conspicuous, more immediately bountiful offer. If I were to move back, I would have my old friends within hand reach, I would feel like an old-timer, I would receive heavier paychecks, and most importantly, I would have somebody by my side.

I didn’t expect to react the way I did to meeting Red again. I knew we would get along, I knew we would have a lot to say to one another, but I didn’t think for one second that he would spin my head into a dizzy panorama of nostalgia, lust and daydreams. The intensity of the emotions caught me off guard: he was cuter, hotter and more comfortable than ever.

I am pitching myself the idea that it was not our decade-old sparks and chemistry that wreaked havoc in our pituitary glands, but, instead a year-old dry spell.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked early into the evening.

“It’s been too long. Over a year now, but even that was just a two-week fling,” I replied.

“Same here. It’s so hard…” he explained.

“…to meet girls. Yeah. I totally understand. Personally, I just don’t want to waste time or energy on dead-end relationships.”

“Say that I meet someone in Dubai, I would have to go there every weekend to see her. It’s fucked up.”

“Yeah, long-distance is not for me. How could it possibly work? Unless there are years of history and the move is temporary…”

On the screen opposite our table, the qualifying game was on. Chelsea vs. Juventus. Our friends kept on walking in from the club to ask Red about the score, who had scored the goal, who was fouled. I was touched he was slow to answer.

The entire evening felt like the gradual sinking into a beanbag. It was increasingly warmer, cozier and more intimate. My body spoke for me, I read the attraction in my gestures: touching his knee, tousling his unrelenting hair, colliding elbows.

We called it an early night, he had work the following morning and I needed to talk to someone about what had just happened.

“The funny things is,” I was telling Flutterby “seeing him hadn’t crossed my mind until I got here. And now, all I can think of is how attracted I am to him. And I now he feels the same, poker face or not, I know this guy. I can read him.”

While I dug into the wedding-white coconut cake her mom had made, she was coming up with a plan of how I could release all this tension.

But all I wanted was to feel his bulging arms and manly chest surround me, nestle my nose in his neck and breathe him in till my lungs were filled to last.

eighty-seven

22:33:55

I’m sleepless in my old room.

Over a year ago, this room was still very much the way I had left it. The sofa bed was where I am sitting now, there was no skateboard or guitar or coffee table in the middle of the room, and certainly no mound of wool with a half-knit scarf on it.

I remember walking hurriedly through the dimly lit corridors, stumbling into my high school bedroom, sheer curtains letting in the pragmatic glow of the street lights, pulling out the sofa into a bed and falling on to it, no linens, no nothing.

The beige furniture kept the loss of teenage innocence from throwing the room, the crime and criminals into the pits of vulgarity. It felt more like a coming of age, like the getting of what you wanted.

Mr.Aisle had insisted I save my cab money and after a few no’s, I accepted his gentlemanly offer to drop me home. His colleague picked us up from the airport and dropped us to his car, which was gathering indigenous Arabian dust somewhere behind a warehouse. He had presented me neither as a co-worker, nor as a friend, but I sensed that I had come off as someone who he could legitimately be dropping home without arousing office coffee break gossip.

When we had made it to my address, he asked me once more:

“Would you come out and have dinner with me?”

“I don’t know…you have to go all the way home to change, and I have to shower and rest…”

“How about I call you in one hour and see how you feel?”

I could deal with that, “Alright, fine”.

A rain of hot water and fruity shampoo later, I was beginning to feel tired. As exciting as it would be to go out with this stranger, I would really love to just sink into the old and familiar couch and watch bad TV.

The phone was ringing, just as he had said, one hour later.

“Listen, I’m really not in the mood of going out tonight. It’s late and I am tired.”

“Oh come on, it’s only 9pm!”

“I know, I know, but until you get here, until we order, till it arrives to the table, by the time we finish, it will be midnight.”

“I promise, you will be back home before midnight.”

“But my hair is wet!”

“I need half an hour. I’ll call you when I’m down!”

“But…!”

“See you!”

Fine. I was going to let his insisting break the wall. What was I going to lose other than an extra hour of sleep? I was not even going to put any effort into this, black loose silk dress, mom’s pumps and no make-up, no hairspray, nada; just plain black tall Jane.

He picked me up and I suggested we go to a gastro bar where there’d be a live band. We sat at the bar, ladies were being served free champagne. It was a good start to our evening.

“I want to ask you something. You are happily married, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So why do you need this? Why do you ask women out to dinners?”

“Because I can. It is very much an ego thing.”

“But why not rise above it?”

“I don’t want to. I don’t do this very often, and there are some opportunities that I would really hate to miss.”

He smelled good, and his body was there, solid and tall, his shirt crisp and clean and his focus centered on me. He leaned in close to my ear.

“Can I kiss you?”

“What?! Here?! Are you out of your mind?”

Two flutes of champagne later and my exclamatory question marks curled up on my lap to purr and slyly watch his lips meeting the secret nakedness of skin behind my ear…and down from the heavenly kingdom we fell.

In the car, in front of the gate, we were making small talk and building up to the ultimate goodbye. In my head I was toying with a daisy, pulling petal after petal after petal – should I or shouldn’t I?

But before I knew it, I had leaned in and kissed him. Pah. Simmer. Mmm. Damn, that felt good. His hand was holding mine, so strong and warm against the chilly blow of the AC.

“Normally, this would be out of question…but, do you want to come inside?”

While my mind was sitting there swamped with stacks of morals, ethics, judicial laws, matrimonial promises, and etiquette, calculating the risks and sins, our bodies were already inside, pressed against the stucco wall, him towering above me, then suddenly down on his knees, my mind unbelieving, unbelieving – oh – let’s go inside, there are security cameras, no, nobody is home.

We walked hurriedly through the dimly lit corridors, stumbled into the bedroom, sheer curtains casting the pragmatic glow of the street lights on the innocent beige furniture, we pulled out the bed, fell on to it, no linens, no nothing, just the perfume of heaven and the gentle drumming of a kingdom coming.

I woke up first. It was about 07h00. He was lying on his stomach, face turned away. The door was slightly ajar. I put on an oversized T-shirt and went looking around the house. The noise of water and dishes was coming from the kitchen. She had just started cleaning! I hurried back upstairs, shook him awake!

“You need to leave. Now!”

He wanted to snuggle and fall back asleep.

“I’m serious. Like right now.”

He was still trying to lower his heel into the shoe, buttoning his shirt, tucking it in, as I led him through the house, my index finger against my pursed lips…

“She’s still in the kitchen. Go! Go!”

“Can I see you again?”

“Just call me later. Sorry, but you need to leave.”

And even though, more than a year has passed, and the furniture has been added/removed and moved around, I still blush at the memory of that night.

Neither he can seem to forget. Every month or so I receive a short e-mail from him:

Miss D. (or whatever your real name is) :-P

How are you?

I know your life might be toooo busy bas maybe eza btitna3ame 3layna with a reply, it wouldn’t hurt…

You are ok? How is everything? Maybe you’re married or engaged?

Hope you will reply…

You take care.

M.A…you remember me! The tall engineer you met on the plane one day and and and…

Or another “just checking on you” version.

Hi.

I don’t know if u r receiving my mails, I just hope am not bothering…want nothing but just want to check on u…hoping all is ok, things are as good as u want them to be…

Tc

Surely it must be just an ego thing for me to reply every so and so e-mails to keep this small dosage of flattery coming my way. Because it’s effortless. Because it fills a small void. Because I can.

sixty-seven

19:37:51

I’m sleepless at Dubai International Airport.

Expect the unexpected. Days, weeks or months can pass by without nothing worth the time passing, but then suddenly, spectacularly, time stops and one after the other stories and encounters start making appearances.

The last few months in Paris have been life-marking. Paris brought to me what I had not anticipated. I am still digesting what had exactly happened since I had last left Beirut.

I had expected a period of bloom, but instead I had shriveled even deeper into myself (did not think that was possible after years of self-reflection!) and learned that I was really the kind of person I did not want to be: shy, docile, and fearful. It took months to get over the insecurities that had resurfaced all at once.

Hence my silence and my “morbid” rantings and ravings. However, I am glad to say that I had managed to redeem myself in the last week I had spent before my summer vacation. The unexpected happened. In a blink of an eye, I was no longer shy and no longer a prisoner of my fears and paranoias and life happened. Life pranced right in. I have so many stories to share that I do not know where to start. I haven’t even had the time to sit down and breathe, hence the use of waiting time at the airport.

I am drowning in my own…beautiful, spectacular and long-awaited…strange encounters of the sleepless kind.

thirty-nine

03:13:55

I'm sleepless in Dubai.

I left everything for the last minute. I packed my bags three hours before my flight, called a cab, picked up a package, picked up an envelope and stumbled into the airport, through the metal detectors, through the cloud of perfume in the duty free area, through the echo-friendly corridors and unto the plane. The urgency of those couple of hours distracted me from the obvious: I was reluctant to leave.

I had no reason to leave Beirut. The trip came to me like a sudden jerk pulling me out of bed two hours before the alarm was due. I wanted to sleep in, to snooze, to let the dream of being back-in-Beirut develop and suck me into a deceptive reality. Instead, an intermission was imposed upon me. 

To help me better remember the dream, I left Beirut as one would leave their room in the morning. Undone, unzipped, unmade. The strings of the last few days I left, untied. I did not sleep much either. An hour, maybe two.

"Ah, I would've joined you"

"Hmm am still here, my 3rd drink, a bit dizzy..I told you I'm here the minute I arrived"

"1. I wouldn't want to intrude 2. I am uninvited 3. You should shout louder."

"u won't intrude my solitude anyway. Told you "indirectly", I never shout loud :)"

I had to. I rummaged through my drawers. There was nothing relevant, nothing sleepless, nothing Beiruti, so I went for the bright and conspicuous: my favourite red die. I threw on some clothes, jumped into the car and went off into the night.

This is where Serendipity started to get creative. My phone buzzed. Unknown Dubai number. 

"So...yea...you know Mr.Keller?"

Worrying at first glance, transparent at second. I was sure this was Capitalyst exploiting his new foreign number. 

"I'm wondering how you made the connection. Till when are you in Dubai?"

"Well, he recognized me as someone you'd once spoken about...and I'm here wondering WTF did you tell him? Until Saturday morning."

"Plans tomorrow night? Pick you up from where?"

I hadn't seen him in a long while now and the fact that we would both happen to be in Dubai at the same time was a fun enough coincidence to call for a reunion. We had a very nice evening together, extricating the Mr. Keller factor, filling up the gap between now and when we last bumped into each other in front of the traffic light in Downtown and discussing possible adventure ventures.

My phone was ringing. Imaginary Extraordinary Him. Wow. The familiar ringtone, his photo, his name, two weeks of dead and bitter silence and the need to sweeten it. I answered.

"I thought you wouldn't pick up."

"What's on your mind?"

"I've been so busy. I've only just had the opportunity to digest what happened in London."

Soon enough, the connection started to break up. Call ended. 

"Don't do this. Don't fuck with me. No, no, no. This is not happening", I said out loud into the shell of my car. Sometimes, strength needs to be punctuated and weaknesses punctured.

I parked. It was a two minute walk from the pub. As I swam through the humid air, a rumble and a shine caught my eye. Non! Clooney's delicious coupe. I recognized the number plate and he sure as hell did not recognize me walking in my jeans and flats in the shadows of Gemmayze. Glad to see he is still roaming the night! 

I climbed up the stairs and walked into the pub. I immediately spotted Lumière to my right, even though he was half hidden by the potted plants. I sat down at the bar and ordered a glass of white.

It so happened that there was no WiFi and I could not come up with a good enough opening line to interrupt his conversation. I called up Belle and she took it from there.

"I left you a red die on the bar", she sent to him.

I waited impatiently. Those five minutes felt like hours. I could not hold it much longer and I was running late as it was. I motioned to the waiter, "Could you do me a favour?"

At that point Lumière got up and went to the bar. I watched the waiter approach him and turned for the exit. As I walked out of the building, Tinkerbell from Peter Pan flashed before my eyes and at the thought of having sprinkled some magic dust on another stranger's evening, I skipped out of the alley and unto the street. I never stopped to look back, but my ears were fine-tuned for the most distant footsteps. His shadow never appeared.

"U could've stayed..."

"I told you I was slippery. I'll want it back soon."

"y did u run?"

"I didn't run, I walked. Are you still there?"

"Nope, am home stranger. U back home I suppose?"

"I'm at a friend's. That's why I left, I was already late! Goodnight?"

"Shower then goodnight. y?"

"I'm getting ideas. Ignore them."

"Such as? Now that u ve told me, how can i ignore them?"

"I want you to be sleepless with me."

"I can arrange that I suppose..."

"So unsure. So hesitant."

"Come on..."

"?"

"not unsure. not hesitant."

"Are you sure? So far, I've been moving the world all along. Your turn."

"yes"

"Move the world."

"i am at this moment."

"I don't see it moving. Roll the die. If it's 6...   If not, it's not time yet."

"it s 2"

"7ayete! I love the honesty."

":)"

"Truth hurts."

"y? I disagree."

"I have a big flaw. When I want something I want it NOW. Hence the comment. But ultimately, truth is the healthiest thing one can pass on to someone else."

"it's so much easier than that"

"How easy?"

"as much as you can think of...believe me"

"I think you just beat me in "slippery". Why didn't you follow the strange rabbit down the rabbit hole?"

"u were a few floors down..and i wasnt sure it was u..( now i am)"

"Anyway, I was hoping to add a little magic to your evening, nothing more. I was hoping you would react quicker, but my wine finished, my friends were waiting, and the clock was about to strike midnight...so I left my "glass slipper" and slipped away :D"

"maybe u were just making a new post who knows..or maybe...ur sleepless...u should come"

"Wrong. I'm hungry."

"I have labneh :p"

"Do you have tea?"

"Yes"

"Put the kettle on, quick, I'm sleepy. How do I find you?"

It's 03:00. What the fuck am I doing? But I'm doing. I get in the elevator with Diagonal. There's a wad of $1000 and a Mercedes car key resting on the hand-rail. 

"Non! Let's just count the money for the sake of it."

The lift stops at the 4th floor and a certain Miss Lebanon X opens the door looking distraught.

"That's a whole lot of money. You should be more careful.", I said.

She takes the money and the keys and closes the door.

"What the fuck was that? A transaction?"

Diagonal and I come up with a number of alternatives to explain the story, but seeing that the subject is already under public scrutiny, we settle for the crack cocaine one.

I'm doing. I'm actually doing. 

"I'm in front of... Now what?"

I sit in my car. Something moves in the alleyway, a figure. I'm doing? Doing. I get out and walk towards him. There's something cosy in the way we move towards each other. His cheek is warm.

I step into his apartment, out of the darkness and into the light. Lumière. I look at him. In the light, away from his FCBK discretion. I look at him, from up close, without leaves in the way. He has a smile that transforms his face into a second face that speaks of different things. I remember that, but the memory of his face is lost. And with that, everything that took place is fading into a select catalogue of details and exchanges. There was a labneh sandwich and lukewarm green tea and relief when he pulled out his Lucky Strikes and his height and his quiescence and the yellow light in the room and the familiar feeling of being in Beirut but a thousand miles away. His lovely apartment quickly took on the quality of a sealed, safe bubble, a quality that I first came to know at Botticelli's. But unlike my visits to Botticelli's or Hugg's or Pope's or insert-name-here, there was no music playing in the background. Lumière was a minimalist in speech as he was in his messages, but his comfort with silence blew me away. We spent more than two hours in that room and there was no music, no television, no computer screen, no telephones ringing and no uncomfortable silence, no dead air.

On the contrary, the air in the room stirred like a dialogue between the sea and the shore. My uttered sentences crashed into the space between us with exaggerated confidence, the sprays of animated intonation and residual gestures trying to gnaw at the smooth surface of Lumière's glistening sands. Impenetrable. With every burst of conversation, the precariousness of the situation and his manner of speech, would send my mind thrashing as my words splashed the room, dissipated, curled up in apparent failure and were then beckoned back into the deep blue sea by a stealthy pull that was discrete, but definitely his.

I loved listening to him speak. His words were nothing poetic, nothing exceptional, but meant for me. They felt precious. Whether timid or skeptical, or intentionally minimalist, his quiet presence came off as soft and sincere. I could've stayed there till dawn and past sunrise, but I considered the possibility of being unable to read him well, that even though he wasn't fidgety or yawning, he might have had enough of this particular dégustation. I didn't want to impose, even though I was close to certain that I wasn't.

I snapped my fingers. I needed to hear a cue. He accompanied me to my car. His cheek was still warm.

These moments are delicate. They are beautiful and refreshing and unexpected. They are light. So light in fact that they have no place on the ground. Like clouds. Ephemeral, unearthly, ethereal. Perfectly intangible. Easily inflatable. DIY castle in the sky.

I've been revisiting that moment. I can remember the room. I can see the outline of Lumière. But I cannot see his face. He cannot see mine. He cannot say my name. I try hard to remember and everything sinks in deeper, but still no face.

I've been back too many times. And it's a long trip from there to Dubai. I wish I stayed.