ninety-nine

20:08:02

I'm sleepless in Dictateur.

On a 24 degree evening like this one, when lovers are sick in bed, shopping for a plastic gun to complete their 007 costume or chewing on Europe, when friends are having dinners with their ex-boyfriends or celebrating their fourth year anniversary in Paris, there is nothing more precious than to spend it with yourself and listen closely to your own wandering eyes and spirit.

After a week of moving within the limits of the car's turning radius or the office obstacle course, I found my secret parking spot and let my legs travel. 

J j  mm <= the words of a fallen avocado on the touch screen.

Red sends me an image. He is dressed as Ceasar.

"Wein James Bond, ya Ceasar inta?"

"Who is Bond to Ceasar?!", he replies.

On an evening like this, when time opens up to accommodate whims and folly, I'm glad that my plans for the night can do the same. My mind has space to run with it, to roll around like a roll-over command, to bark, to mark street corners, and to fetch an idea that it had thrown sometime on Monday. I pet myself because I am still okay. I've done well on the resistance front, because years into my war of identity, I haven't betrayed either side.

This dichotomy of mind used to worry me - mustn't I make a choice? Is it not important to know on which side of the front you're standing on? Is it not important to assume a style and stick with it?

A month ago, my mother's childhood friend said to me, "His power laid within his unpredictability." And it hit me: this is where freedom may reign and this was the only thing I had going for me, this ability to walk the line, this balance under a growing mountain of weight.

I've yet to feel inevitability, the inevitability of a cul-de-sac and no way out. There always is. Hope can sometimes feel like a disease, like a cloudy film wrapped around your senses, or maybe, like a sixth sense with its feeler tentacles stretched in front, groping, carressing, testing how ripe an occasion is. You determine the twist.

Of course, doubt turns up every now and then, knocking, knocking, like a preacher, barking, barking, like a dog sent in from Cartesia. My only concrete fear is that of "Revolutionary Road" - to discover that you were moving in the wrong direction and think it too late to change course. It's strenuous to constantly question yourself, "Was this a good decision? Did I do the right thing?". Fuck that. Adapt. Outrun your hounds and leave them panting with regret for ever having run after you in the first place. Outsmart yourself. Be brave. You're on your own and you are your own, do whatever it takes.

I gave normality a chance. I said "No" when it was expected of me, I took it slow, I thought it through and I can safely look back on it as the dullest year ever. I tried your way of reason and it didn't thrill me. It didn't leave me broken hearted, true - but it broke my spirit. I had even saved a psychoanalyst's number and dialed it once to schedule an appointment, but hung up before I let self-pity do the talking. I wasn't in that deep, not yet.

I like to let my thrills spill over me as much as I like to spill them over everything I see. I like to count them, list them, draw them, think, write and talk about them. They make me as much as I make them and I'd be naked without their company. I'd walk past all their houses without smiling, I'd move through Beirut without turning corners and I'd leave in a second the moment it would blow up. I like to let my thrills add a bit of weight to my story, a bit of complaint from the baggage handlers and a bit of a bitter aftertaste to my initial sweetness. I like to be alone on an evening like this, with my glass of wine and busy fingers.

ninety-eight

01:34:32

I’m sleepless in Beirut.

I’m not sure if it comes with age or if it is a natural ability that I’ve improved on or whether the walls of my heart have been so stretched by shoulder-brushing occupants that there is newfound space for additional rooms. The nature of my emotional engagement looks almost like a flow chart of the check-ins and checkouts in a hostel. Objects of desire are constantly flowing and moving in and out of the frame. It’s as though I watch them move within its borders until I see the perfect shot – click – and I’m done. The duration of my interest is like the gaze of a people watcher stationed on a park bench: an attractive figure enters far left, approaches, approaches, when in close proximity my neck begins to turn slowly from left to right until I cannot see the face no more, and while I turn my head back to look out at the far left for someone new - play that in slow motion - the amount of time it takes for the head to turn from the right side back to the left is equal to the lingering of the memory of the figure that just passed by, and the further I turn away, the less I feel and oh, in comes a new one! And the cycle resumes.

I am at once amazed and concerned with this nonchalance. Would one person ever be enough? Or is this monogamy business an unrealistic model for our modern times to begin with?

I recently read a book, “How to Think More about Sex” and it made me feel less alone. Alain de Botton, whose writings and acute observations I cherish, explains how monogamy came to be.

“Taking a step back, what distinguishes modern marriage from its historical precedents is its fundamental tenet that all our desires for love, sex and family ought to reside in the selfsame person. No other society has been so stringent or so hopeful about the institution of marriage, nor ultimately, as a consequence, so disappointed in it.

In the past, these three very distinct needs – for love, sex and family – were wisely differentiated and separated out from one another. The troubadours of twelfth-century Provence, for example, were experts in romantic love. The libertines of early-eighteenth century Paris were just as devoted, but in their case to sex rather than romance. For its part, the impulse to raise a family has been well known to the largest share of humanity since our earliest upright days in East Africa.

The independence, if not the incompatibility, of our romantic, sexual and familial sides was held to be an untroubling and universal fact of life until the mid-eighteenth century, when, among members of one particular segment of society in the more prosperous countries of Europe, a remarkable new ideal began to take shape. This ideal proposed that henceforth, spouses ought not to be satisfied with just tolerating each other for the sake of the children; instead, and in addition, they were to regard it as their due to deeply love and desire each other. Their relationships were to wed the romantic energy of the troubadours to the sexual enthusiasm of the libertines. Thus was set before the world the compelling notion that our most pressing needs might be solved all at once, with the help of only one other person.

It was no coincidence that the new ideal of marriage was created and backed almost exclusively by a specific economic class: the bourgeoisie, whose balance of freedom and constraint it also uncannily mirrored. With a little extra money to spare for relaxation, bourgeois lawyers and merchants could now raise their sights and hope to find in a partner more than merely someone who could help them to survive the next winter.

The notion of entering into a loveless or indifferent marriage was as much anathema to a bourgeois as the concept of not having outside affairs would have been to a libertine.”

Certainly, I would love to find somebody who could incarnate everything I love, desire and care for, and I know that a certain amount of compromise would need to be involved. Even if there are such perfect-fitting persons out there, what are the chances of the two of us crossing paths? Meager, to say the least.

So I thought, why not Red? Ten years down the line and we still cared for one another, we got along and we understood, if not wholly, the notion how either of us worked. After seeing him in Dubai, I found myself thinking more and more about the prospect of us coming to a sort of conclusion. “Right here, this is where our search will end, and we will work on making us work.”

But at the moment, I am not ready and neither is he. We are too young and still hungry and still hopeful. I can see it happening a couple of years down the line. We have the chemistry, we have the love; all we would need is conviction and a continuous exercising of effort to not fall through the comfortable cracks of commitment.

So I wrote to him. I laid out my logic, I laid out my feelings and it felt good to click send and not worry about being rejected. He wrote back to me the following day and I was touched. I felt cocooned.

“It’s a fucking shame that we currently do not live in the same country, I would have definitely not let go of you if we did. I’m going to finish up by expressing myself in four words and hope that you truly understand me when I tell you: I love you too.”

What more could I ask for? Nothing. This is all we have, this perpetual love that resurfaces every time we cross paths. Yet, in the meantime, I do not see it necessary to cling on to something so virtual as a feeling of love. I love him, I do, but I am not there with him and neither is he with me. What foundation other than a high-school romance and a warm fuzzy feeling do we have to build on?

I was missing him too much, so I decided to turn my head back to the left for now and wait for him to pass me by again at a more convenient time.

I sat there on the bench, looking ahead for no one, when in came a familiar figure. It was Kavinsky and his phone was to his ear.

“Where are you?”

“I’m going home. Just left.”

“I’m in Gemmayze, come!”

“I was just there. But I’m tired, and I need to get up early.”

“Oh come on.”

“No, really…”

“What are you doing this weekend?”

“I’m not yet sure.”

“I miss you. I want to see you. Let’s do something.”

“Tabb call me Friday and we’ll see.”

This man, I had sworn off, but there was a pull of gravity, still. Amazingly, I still felt I had another chance of handling him better. I didn’t know how, but I trusted I could improvise…after all, you live and you learn.

ninety-three

21:51:07

I’m sleepless at a distance from Beirut.

Red messaged me “Are you safe?”

Exactly twenty four hours had passed since the blast in Achrafieh that cast a heavy shadow over our glazed eyes, and I was beginning to wonder whether this guy really cared about me or whether he watched every TV channel but the news.

I was safe and I was happy. I was happy to escape into a corner of the country where I could love it with all my heart. The sea was a blanket of golden oil, one with the sky, and Yamamoto and I were zooming towards the blinding sun, our screams of free at last, free at last diving in and out of the waves and the wind pockets we left in tow.

“Let’s go to Cyprus!!! Yamamoto, shafte, shafte!”

And she was a glorious driver, my peals of joyous laughter justifying the tears in my eyes. We saw nothing but a soft blurred horizon, a barely visible line between nude lipstick and skin, something of an allegory for the days to come.

“After yesterday, khallas, I am not neutral anymore, this is not normal…”, her voice filled the car on our way to Batroun.

No more neutral. No more neutered balls. No more neutered innocence and innocent lives. “Patriarch, Mufti condemn the blast”, I read that morning on some .com. Tell us something new old men, because we commend the new, because we condemn your century-old neutered balls and we commend the new. This is no country for old men who struggle with creative writing, who plagiarize pages of dated history and cheat and pay their way to a passing grade. Let’s face it – you are failures and you have failed us. All of you old-timers have failed your people, your people and every single one of your Gods is witness to your failure. I don’t know how you sleep at night or swallow your food or sound your sirens when you bully us on the road, when you bully us with your cancerous roadblocks and your cancerous ideals. I don’t know how you wash your hands, how you dry your dirty laundry in the public square nor how you came to be so apt in self-brainwash. There is nothing noble or honourable you can do for this rich (now depleted) magnificent (now scarred) ancient (still stuck) land that you were lucky to be born in, but do not deserve to walk on, let alone serve. There is nothing noble or honourable you can do because you, when alone in your head or with your sacred book on your head, cannot even serve yourself the truth that you are failures, failures, failures. Any self-respecting well-meaning man or woman would either retreat or try harder and harder and harder until implosion. Instead, you jerk off upon all of us and spread your defunct, impaired, curdled semen into hollow craniums that may as well have been dug up from some Stone Age mass grave. We condemn your frustrated strokes and tugs and your impotent cloudy trickles, and most of all we condemn your demand for us to swallow. No more swallow, no more neutral, we condemn the whole lot of you. We don’t want you. We want new.

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.

ninety

23:11:24

I’m sleepless in Beirut, my feet upon a mound of bedsheets,

and still recovering from being sleepless in between time zones. The lost hours are not lost at all, they just accumulate and grow into a tumor of heavy and laggard until you can do nothing but vanquish it by stamping your face into a pillow.

The empty stretch of bed to my left is where I came to the last inch of my conclusion: this kid needs at least ten more years to feel like a man. Excel was fun, he hardly ever bored me, he was brainy, he had managed to acquire good taste in music over the last few years, he was quirky and he was cute. Seeing him asleep in the morning I only felt slightly sad that something was stunting his growth.

“You want me to be more serious?”

“It’s not a question of being fun or serious, it’s about maturity. You’re so jumpy sometimes, hopping from one idea to the next without letting the other person finish.”

“You know, you’re right, you’re right. I’m so stressed at work that it plays with my mind. It’s probably my medication,” and he went on to explain his mild anxiety disorder.

“How long have you been taking it?”

“For about a year. After that time in Paris…”

He was referring to the weekend he came to visit me. Despite his nervous state, so intense that even I was slightly disturbed, it was one of the best times we spent together.

“Stop fidgeting! I can’t sleep like this!” I had told him off on his first night.

On the last day we went for a long walk along the Seine, into the Marais, through the galleries of Centre Pompidou and the Jardin des Tuilleries. By the time we had two hours left to his departing train, it was like a comedy of love.

We laid on the grass beneath the overcast sky, crows picking at leftover biscuits, his shirt over my naked shoulders and my head on his lap. Looking at the scattered couples around us, for once I felt like I was living the Parisian postcard. In the urgency of the last moment, it was pure and innocent. I even wished he’d miss his train.

But we made it on time to the Gare du Nord, separating in the tunnel that linked it to the Gare de l’Est. I may have been a little sad, but having grown so used to dealing with separation, I only texted him with a wish for a safe return.

Come to think of it, Excel and I only ever lived such moments: a day here, two days there. Yet, sitting here with him in the early hours of the morning I felt like I was less engaged. Perhaps if I hadn’t met Red in Dubai, I would have allowed myself to be seduced by the idea of making it work with this boy with whom I played house with in 4^th grade.

“Do you see us together?” I asked.

“Let’s just say that whenever I’m with another girl, I always see you in the corner with a disapproving look.”

I didn’t need to dig further. He hadn’t answered the question, the ground beneath us was still firm.

An hour later, it was Red standing in the room and I wished instead that it were himself he was watching. I could only imagine how much more ignited and intense everything would be. I closed my eyes and Excel was no more.

eighty-nine

17:43:53

I’m sleepless in Beirut.

My second cup of espresso has just been emptied and my phone is constantly by my side – a week of revisiting old friendships has left me hungry and tired.

I have laid to rest the question of home, at least for now. I mustn’t shake my ground every chance I get. It’s a fact: my heart has been split into four. I’ve rooted each cut in four different corners of the globe and I have no choice but to appreciate the fact that every time I return, they will be there waiting for me to nurture them further.

During my flight, I had decided that for the moment my place was here in Beirut. It didn’t deserve to be dismissed just because I had allowed my life to stagnate. Beirut was not the problem, I was.

And it was a challenge to turn around in the airplane and see that it was barely making quarter capacity, to walk through a ghost filled airport and into a loud argument between taxi drivers, past the soldiers adorned with death hanging from shoulder straps, to have a random volunteer ignore me as he stuffed the suitcase into the bulimic trunk, to get to Achrafieh in 10minutes on a Saturday night

“Are you sure nothing is happening that they haven’t shared on the news?”

to wake up tired, to have salesladies expect some kind of good service from me, to see young men do wheelies on the southern highway at 120km/hr, to pray that the shaky wheel doesn’t tip one millimeter extra and scar me for life.

What good could come from entertaining provocation? I nursed the scattered irritations to rest.

The entire day I couldn’t find peace, and when I found myself in the sea of evening traffic flowing back to Beirut, I couldn’t escape myself. My guts were churning with anxious moths, smoke was billowing out the window like I was on a freight train and my voice was at its peak rapping the same four songs over and over again.

Somewhere near the airport tunnel I spotted the Red flag. I was missing him damn it. I just wished he were here so I could walk him through this gallery of Bacons and Dalis. Red would always listen. He’d put on such a patient show that it seemed he was rethinking the same thoughts and feeling the same emotions so that he could – one moment – get back to me on the matter. And it was never soiled with judgment.

So I caved in to my expectations of him and sent him a short text

“Am I silly to not be able to get you out of my head?”

“I don’t feel silly, so you shouldn’t.”

Immediately, the tranquilizer was released. Somehow, I felt less guilty about last night. I wondered whether I should tell him, but it would have been the entertainment of provocation. Ever since we broke up on that Valentine’s Day at school, there was no deal to betray. I cared about him deeply and…

“I’m going to bed, but I felt I have to share this: care is an understatement when it comes to u, you bring the best out in me, if that makes sense. I need people like that in my life. Want you to know that.”

I was ecstatic to receive this in the midst of the comedy that was going on at the table. For a long second, I felt like I was safe to make a fool out of myself here tonight because someone out there thought that I was immune to falling low. Bringing out the best in someone? It made sense.

Moments later, Excel called. He was waiting to board the plane. I was glad we would once again have distance between us because now I was sure: Red felt like home and Excel was a public holiday.