hundred-and-seven

12:37:11

I’m tanning in the Christmas sun.

The last Christmas celebrations…I cannot even remember. They all blend into a single memory of lunch at grandma’s house, which is like every other lunch except that we sit at the dinner table and take longer than usual. We’ve never been a jolly family as a whole. Most of our best moments together were spent in batches of different configurations, my sisters and I, my parents and I, mom and I... So this Christmas, to save me from sneers, I would give up the forcing of “special”.

(Un)Conveniently, this Christmas fell on a Tuesday, which was a pain, alas, if you happened to have the extended family’s humble abode be tucked away somewhere in the far reaches of Lebanese topography, and have work on both of the days that snuggled the 25^th ever so tightly.

But as much as you’d like to fight the Christmas spirit, it catches up on you as all friends retreat to family and friends’ dinners, as the streets empty to the point where you can walk down the asphalt spine of Gouraud Street without touching the sidewalk, as cars leave empty parking spaces to clog mountain and valley road flanks, as everyone shuts their doors expecting that even the loneliest of people had made plans for the eve.

I hadn’t made any and I was going to stand by the notion that the best plan is no plan. If the night were meant to be magical, the faeries would find me in some form or colour, regardless of my hideout.

When I was a little human forty-eight inches tall helping to decorate the house with paper snowflakes pressed on frozen window panes, or when I was only three foot six waking up in the middle of the night to see whether Santa had delivered my modest requests, Christmas was the day when the books and stories that I read came to sit with me and only me. Maybe it’s because I didn’t take the hiding seriously, or maybe it’s because somewhere deep inside I did not really want to be alone on the night that was the most awaited time of my childhood years, that the ho ho ho came knocking on my door.

It was unexpected that at an hour to midnight I’d be greeted by a lovely lady in red after a day’s worth of tire shopping, car shoeing, street roaming and poster gluing. , She introduced me to grandmas, aunties, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, one of whom handed me a plate of pumpkin soup for company. Imaginary-Extraordinary-Him was nowhere to be seen except on my phone’s screen.

“Wainik? I can meet you down. I’m waiting for you to eat.”

“I’m up.”

And then he appeared looking slightly fazed but quite handsome, and looking at the lady in red I deduced that good looks ran in the family.

It felt strange that I was happy, far removed from familiar faces, yet so warmly surrounded by a large family that didn’t seem to have ever indulged in the well of Mediterranean disputes. Of course, it is always easy to idealise an image that one covets to be one’s own.

And then came a touching moment, that stirred the walled-off barricaded me. Imaginary-Extraordinary-Him had grabbed a stool and a Santa hat to hand out the gifts. He called my name. My eyebrows reconfigured into a puzzled wave.

“Me?”

“Yes, you, come over here and give Santa a kiss.”

It was so endearing that he had fished out a last-minute emergency gift, probably meant for someone else, and wrapped it up from him to me. It was the only gift I would receive this Christmas, but it got to me like only a simple loving gesture could. I took my time to open it, savouring the notion that someone cared, enough, and I felt a crack run down my wall, split me open just enough to see that I sort of cared enough about him as well.

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.

fifty

03:25:26


I'm sleepless in Beirut.


I better watch out, I better not cry, better not pout, I'm telling you why, London is coming to town. They have made a list, they're checking it twice, they already know who's naughty and nice...so try and be good for goodness sake!


Imaginary-Extraordinary-Him and Balding should land in Beirut in the coming days. Or so they said. Or do I say this because I care?


I do remember.


I met Balding at Art Lounge. He was here on vacation. I was ordering drinks. He stood a little behind me to my left. I felt his gaze. He later explained he wasn't looking at me. I turned to ask for a light. He told me he didn't smoke. I used the candle instead. He made fun of my "do you have a light?" line. I retorted that it wasn't a line, I had in fact lost my lighter. He asked me what I did in life. I let that slip and I answered and reciprocated the question. He continued the conversation. I did not have anything better to do. He seemed like a nice guy. I seemed like a nice girl. We spoke until I left. I gave him my number. He said he'd call the next day. I then realized that he hadn't even asked for it. He must have thought I was eager. I thought I had made a terrible mistake. He waved to me as I drove off. I hoped that was the last I'd see of him. Ma2ele jlede. I had Imaginary-Extraordinary-Him and a plan to go to London.


Imaginary-Extraordinary-Him used to sing to me. He would play on his guitar and sing and I would replay the voicemail a  hundred times. We would both pour wine simultaneously and our video conversations would become increasingly frivolous as the drops collected in our blood. We would share the sounds of bath water, afternoon jogs and kitchen utensils and we imagined that the other was right there. We knew how we would feel one against the other, how we would fit, because the weight of our words made us corporeal. We would stay up for hours, past bedtime, past logic, past reality, past the present, past the future, absorbed in conversation, absorbed by the pixels sent via cables and satellites until we were close to collapse and sometimes past that. When Skype was beyond reach, we would pour ourselves down letters and text messages, and every moment would be missing something until we had exchanged a message or a comment, till we made poetry bleed from between the lines.


"I'm at Deir el Qamar. There is a girl on stage playing the flute."


"I'm at a really pretentious place called Kensington Roof Gardens."


"So much. So so much.   [pretend I am your ground]"


"I don't need to pretend...it's all relative. You're real."


"So are you. I don't even miss you."


"I do [saying the same thing as you in a different way :) ]...


...the next morning... 


...I woke up with bits and fragments of yesterday's attempts to read parts of your e-mail. Finding myself often scrambling for an imaginary pen and paper to pin down important thoughts I wanted to share with you before they slip out of my mental cavity or sucked back to some hidden parts of my brain. Your existence seems to be unleashing a dormant creature in me, like a third eye of spirituality, almost like I cannot imagine a world without you because it's so much more awake with you, Sleepless, a new dimension...well, in blunt honesty I'm not sure what it is but hell I can't wait to write you back. I hope it's not just out of curiosity, but even that is fine in our world..."


"To read that and try to reply...I'd only be lying."


"."


To share that and try to unbelieve it, would have been a crime against every fairytale I had ever read before going to bed. I had to believe it. I had to think that I had found that other person who could read my mind, who could navigate it and who could love it, because if I had been cynical, I would have died then and there. All hope of that special something extraordinary would have left me.


But maybe the trick of that extraordinary special something surviving was to abstain from ever touching it. Like a surface of glass, still and impeccable, mirror to the sky, ode to strolling clouds, a plane to a reflection matrix, once touched, even if by a wisp of air escaping the mouth above the water surface, would be perturbed from shore to shore for days, maybe weeks to come. And only when its unfathomable stillness would be restored, only when the earth would appear as though it had never moved, only when the last grain of sand settled at the bottom, only then would it be beautiful again and the eyes that looked upon the lake in awe and fascination would be long gone.


I think we both knew that, but the possibility of us never meeting became a projection of possible anguish and pain. I justified everything with a "What if?"


"What if you're the one? The one I could spend the rest of my life with? Wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't it be something to have caught a frivolous thought of you being my man, my forever before ever having touched you and then discovering it to be a prophecy that came true?"


In the end, I just wanted to know. I couldn't weigh the What if? question in my head anymore. It became an obsession and all the signs, the dwindling communication, the change in tone, the broken promises, they never reached me through the fog. I succumbed to a sort of Saramagian blindness - my eyes were licked over with a milky whiteness through which I could never see past, but I always insisted on squinting in the hope that I sooner or later would.


So I bought my ticket to London. Willingly and consciously, the most beautiful thing was tarnished, and I think we both knew that, but the excitement of the trip lied to us. We were deceived by our very own lie. 


The truth was ugly. Or it didn't fit. It was two sizes too small. Or was our lie two sizes too big? It doesn't matter. The pantylines were obvious.


It's strange to know that we will be in the same city once again. It's strange to not feel the same excitement that I did last. It's strange to acknowledge that something extraordinary was but a figment of the imaginary. Or was it? Can something be dismissed as a hypochondriac's fancy once you have felt it in your bones? I refuse to think that the line between tangible and intangible is that clear. But the strangest thing is that I have come to terms with the failure. I admit to having knitted a sweater two sizes too big. I admit to having tried to wear it. I admit that the largeness of it did not bother me, but it was the prickly wool that made me take it off and stow it away.


I admit that I sometimes wonder why it plummeted and I admit that I cannot pin down why. I admit that I am curious. I hope it's just that, curiosity, because that is fine in our world. 

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.