hundred-and-four

21:40:18

I’m sleepless in Beirut.

There must be a name for it, teetering on a thin line between adaptability and self-deceit. I’d like to think that I’m keeping my balance, but in the back of my mind I know that balance is a religion of minute proportions. At any moment, if I’m caught off guard, I could slip.

I feel like I shouldn’t put it into words, I feel like what we have is sacred and only ours, but I never, never ever, want to forget that day.

It all happened rather suddenly. I had e-mailed him after spending a few late night hours going through old photos.

“I want this end to end.”

Little by little, over the course of a few days, I grew more adamant. I was anxious and scared, but I wanted to see him, I had missed him. Yet the old paranoia of being too unabashed, borderline invasive, kept me from taking drastic measures. I messaged him once more, I called him, but there was no clear sign that he felt anything more than a shadow of kindness towards a fond memory.

Then one morning came an e-mail. It wasn’t personal per se, but enough of a glimmer for me to call him up just one more time.

Botticelli picked up, “Coucou. Long time!”

“Finally, finally, I got through to you!”, I laughed.

“Do you want to have lunch? I’ll be operational in an hour,” he said closing the conversation.

I threw my hangover out the window, jumped into the shower, changed three times, and flew through the streets, singing, “Ain’t no sunshine” at the top of my lungs.

What was meant to be lunch, turned out to be a glorious feast, followed by a walk, the pinching of cheeks, incessant talking, remembering, sharing, brainstorming, sketching, working, hugging and holding, holding, holding unto the dearest.

People have come and people will go, but the ones with who time stands frozen are the people one must shelter from one’s vanities and selfish whims. People that will care about you will be few; they will be few when you are twenty and they will be few when you are eighty.

I have betrayed my responsibility towards them. I thought that if I had been dispensable to others, others should become dispensable to me. People can make it almost impossible with their parade of foolishness, but they must not be taken lightly. Ultimately, you should dispense of those that you cannot care for, those that you cannot give anything back to, those that are beyond your reach. Dispense of empty relationships, but own up to those that try despite your own foolish circus.

I had betrayed him. I am sure of it because I sensed a shift in responsibility. I had always thought that he owed me something for being distant, for keeping me at bay, but he was right to do so. And now, sitting there with him, listening to his actions, he didn’t have to say a word for me to realize that he had given me something worth guarding. I am in debt for his honesty and I have to make it up in weight.

It was past midnight and I didn’t want to leave, I was fearful that my harebrained pack of wolves would have me running with them to sniff out buried bones the moment I stepped beyond the threshold of his home. Fifty-nine moons had risen and fallen, to howl yet again seemed almost primitive, to promise anything was just as wise, but I felt it this time, I felt it against my ribcage, that I should never, never ever let him go again.

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.

fifty-seven

22:43:48

I’m sleepless in Paris.

Today I came across the term “touch and go woman”. If you search the term online, you will come across a wide range of interpretations, but I’ve come to adopt my own: someone who likes to get a taste of, but never stick around, her departure being vague and non-finite.

If I retrospect, it’s something I’ve been guilty of, but without the burden of guilt. Most of my relationships dwindled; that is to say, their endings never as abrupt as the snipping off of an umbilical cord. And I like that. I like that because I have come to amass an address book of worn down, yet unbroken ties.

There is a place of memory that I like to call The Morgue. It is a basement of past relationships and depending on your own story, it goes down a couple of levels.

A level for your broken or lost family ties.

A level for your handicapped friendships.

A level for your shattered hearts.

The Morgue is not the same as The Cemetery. The Cemetery holds those we will never forgive or those who will never come back to life. The Cemetery is not void of life. You revisit now and again, when something triggers the memory of that person, you pause at their tombstone and then walk away. Some things just cannot be undone.

The Morgue is that in between zone, where we house those we cannot let go of. Cadavers are at our disposal to be revisited, dissected and scrutinized, to be pardoned, to be chilled for a Cryonic Era.

My mnemonic landscape is comprised of a tiny cemetery and a very large morgue. I have troubled letting go.

The skewed confession of a monophobe.

Perhaps confessing to monophobia is taking it a little far, but then again, what are all those blue bodies doing in my closet?

Lulu, Botticelli, Freud, Capitalyst, Leon, The Pope, Imaginary-Extraordinary-Him not even Balding, have been buried. I even see them from time to time, outside The Morgue, where it smells of fresh beginnings. To paint them better, to turn their skin pink.

I saw The Pope the other week. We had drinks in Le Marais. He is the only one that stands out amongst the list. We called it quits back in Beirut, an official break-up.

I was a little shaky about meeting him, but all that got buried beneath the layer of getting lost and walking up and down wrong streets until I finally found number 78.

We sipped on white wine and caught up with each other’s lives, all the while seated, the cold slowly gnawing through the layers of coats and sweaters and T-shirts, until we could sit it through no more. He dropped me home and we promised each other a homely dinner in the weeks to come.

But as one corpse rots, other beings come to life. Out of the blue, or perhaps from underneath a pretext I have yet to trip on, Sobriquet, a friend of The Pope’s who I knew only vaguely, decided to put an end to my social emergency. He has opened the doors to a Paris that I would normally need a couple of months to arrive at.

I consider myself lucky, for Sobriquet has not been the sole hero. Roquette and Bonbonheur have allowed me to play my anonymous little game until the moment we found ourselves face to face. There is nothing more thrilling than meeting a walking definition of stranger, although I must say I did envy their position. I knew enough to know they were not psychopaths, too much information for thrills and chills, while I kept them guessing till the very last minute. 


I'd like to not know for a change.

It takes a certain amount of fascination, a certain humbleness in the face of the unknown and a certain amount of trust in goodness and sincerity. If there should ever be a pandemic, it should be of this unbruised mindset.

forty-four

02:16:57

I'm sleepless in Beirut.

Lumière is in bed and I'm on his computer. 

"You should write something"

Should I? Who am I writing for now? I will write for the ghosts of my past who still haunt every precious corner. My precious ghosts who vanish as soon as I touch them.

I saw Botticelli tonight. 

"T'as vraiment changé. Douce.  Zen. T'es une femme. T'es une femme."

He was the same. I was myself now. We were different. No bitter history, just smiles and curled up legs on the sofa and the comfort of having known the before and the comfort of being able to be in the present. We hugged for a long time. No weapons of yesterday, no record books of who was left behind and who emerged unbruised, no dirty laundry. Fresh sheets, fresh shave, fresh stories to tell.

"Shoo betkhabrina?"

"I did something crazy. I went to London to meet a complete stranger."

"Khawta."

"It's amazing how much you can connect without actually meeting a person."

"And find that the reality is different?"

"Non, pas vraiment. The first few days were great, but then there was a cut." I motioned scissors. "The last day was horrible."

"Tu tombes toujours sur des malades."

But it takes two. We named them des cas spéciaux. I'm attracted to impossible cases. He's attracted to incompatible cases. What are we running from?

But it takes two. I'm an impossible case and he's incompatible and together we are im- and in- and we can stare at the ceiling and think of the harsh light that obliges us to be frank and awake to our reality. Botticelli's will always be an honest space where nudity is just another mask on the wall staring down at us.

But my reality is not a moment and it is not really there anymore for me to own. But there, I can own up to it because there is nothing to lose anymore. The battle has been forgotten and the battlefield is an overgrown patch of wild field where leaves of grass are fresh and soft on our soles.

My reality is in this room where it has set up camp. A nomadic reality that shelters us and gathers us underneath the sheets, sometimes a bundle of writhing limbs and sometimes a body with four legs and arms breathing with one pulse and sometimes two pairs of eyes that look into the distance and do not meet. To be separate in the together is the impossible, but it is the element that makes us compatible. Lumière is dark and darkness I have always found appealing. To be blind and undistracted, to concentrate on peeling away the bed linen, the clothes, the translucent skin, the Myocardiocyteal muscle tissue, the opaque bones, the thoughts, the secrets, until there is nothing but light.

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.