I'm eager to return to Beirut, to unpack and to re-embrace my reality. An out-of-proportion storm has been stirred up in my cup of tea and as autumn begins to creep into my consciousness, I want to sit back and watch the tea leaves leave the hypnotizing swirl and sink to the bottom of the glass where they will dance until the earth stops moving from beneath my feet. I want to be still like those tea leaves and meditate on the now. My itch to run has been scratched.
Sometimes I wonder whether I will ever be able to turn around and face myself*. I'm always ahead of myself, always running, always escaping. Nothing can keep me still, not even an arrow to the heart. Shot, I limp and struggle like a pierced deer, spraying my blood everywhere, but taking my heart to die alone inside me.
I escaped the summer months by falling in love with a man who wasn't there. I escaped the only thing that kept us apart by flying over to see him. I escaped reality by forgetting that we were strangers. I escaped the love by smoking it as fast as I could. I escaped the goodbye by being late for my flight and by being angry. I escaped back to where he isn't. But will I escape my regrets?
I have to. Time moves forward. I have to move forward.
Sometimes they feed the pigeons too, but I'm keeping the chocolate brownie for myself. It was a welcome gift after all.
So strange being here, it's as though I never left. Three years of life and a wooden bench is a clasp that links a line into a loop. The grass is as green, the pigeons as plenty, the squirrels as quirky a sight, the strollers as faceless, the sun as fickle and life as beautiful. Only this morning Hamra was as familiar, but mustier, damper, like a weight to the soul. The autumn leaves move with the wind here, echoing dryness against the rough paths. I lick my lips for them and swallow traces of chocolate.
That morning I left the Kensington apartments to escape the fact that I had passed out on the floor and my prettier friend got the bed with Victorian linens. She looked like a baby doll and I had the taste of liquor in my mouth. It was cold but sunny and the Household Cavalry were trotting by already. Jogging Shorts sat down beside me to tie up his shoe laces.
"I live nearby. I'm a finance this-and-that. Jogging is what I do in the mornings."
Never having understood finance, economics or commerce, I was drawn to him because he did. Or maybe because he lived round the corner and I was impressionable and dreamy and thought that I had tripped upon Prince Henry. Probably that and my weakness for luxury cars and a faint whiff of a Jaguar ride about town and whether there was a connection or not, I took his card and promised to call him.
He turned out to be a pretty ordinary fellow who I couldn't look in the eye, but who took me out for the most delicious watermelon midori I had ever tasted, who, despite boring me, made me miss my last tube back home and to make up for it offered me a space in his bed. I took the night bus instead and walked alone the empty streets with hurried heel chatter.
My pretty friend found him ugly and then so did I.
A girl is taking a photograph of a squirrel, which then climbs up her leg, mistaking itself for being admired rather than just being a plain curiosity to the common tourist. I like squirrels, most of all their puffy tails. I looked at one closely the other day and realized that it wasn't any different from a rat's tail except it had long hairs that always stood on end. Superficial tails, superficial me. Throw us in the water and we will emerge like toothpicks that were feathers, once. Throw a Jaguar in the water and it will sink.
Throw a paper that says "BEY ROUTH" and it will float, just like it did above the crowds waiting for the arrivals to exit. Throw a chocolate brownie in the river and it will melt, but the water will taste sweet. Throw myself off the London bridge and I will drift to his doorstep because he makes me float. Imaginary Extraordinary Him is a helium cloud in my body and mind, delivering me to the streets of London like the rolling autumn leaves carried by the wind.
So I sit here, hands blue and slightly trembling, waiting to see him again. He gave me the keys to his place, which would sink if thrown into a river, but that could open doors to places I don't think I have ever seen.
I'll curl up in his bed, and he'll find that his thrown jacket takes the shape of a curvy hip and he'll slip in alongside me and my hands will not be blue any more, but they might tremble at the fact that something imaginary and virtual is tangible and I came all the way to London just to tremble and shake the bits and pixels off a reverie.
I'm sleepy after Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal.
"Filtenin. Shoo filtenin na7na! We separate for one night and already we have stories to tell in the morning!"
Flutterby giggles, her burning joint quivering between her index and middle. We look at each other in celebration of the years of continuous madness that we've been sharing since high school. Bonnie & Bonnie, partners in crime.
She went out to meet her ex, to close doors courteously, but discovered instead that letting go was exiting through entering and not the other way around.
I went out to meet Diagonal from back home...
The ghostly glass towers echoed our excitement of being in a new place. We knew each other well enough to not compromise our freedom, our anonymity. Together we were no one.
"I have to tell you something."
"What? Is everything okay?"
"Yeah. Try and guess what it is."
"You got a tattoo?"
"No. It's something I'm born with."
"How am I supposed to know? It could be so many things. Is it physical? Psychological? Do you have a health problem?"
"Oh my god, how can you not guess?"
"Do you have a tail?"
He burst out laughing.
"I'm gay."
"Haha, very funny."
"I am."
"No way. You're bullshitting."
"I swear."
"Really?"
"Yes."
I was still nursing my disbelief, but I didn't want to make him regret telling me, if he actually was being serious.
"How? When did you know?"
"It's something you're born with. I was sure when I hit puberty."
"Wow," He must be telling me the truth. "I really appreciate you telling me."
"I'm sorry for misleading you with my text messages. It wasn't all fake. I mean I do think you're hot, but..."
By then I had sat down to better absorb the shock of it all. This was the final straw in my series of judgement misfires. I, the undersigned, pledge to give up on trying to discern people's sexual orientation. I didn't even consider the possibility of his being different. But ultimately, why would it matter? Why do people make it their own business where homosexuality is concerned?
Straight people have a very slight, if any, true understanding of what it is like to be attracted to someone of the same sex. I have had thoughts, yes, but I have never caught myself looking at a girl passing me by and thinking of sliding my hands around her waist and up her back and kissing her on her neck, gently. Such urges are solicited by men only. Fantasies involving girls creep up on me when I'm daydreaming or nursing some Neanderthal's freshly inflicted wound. Straight people should calm the fuck down and stop passing judgement on something they do not comprehend and have no active role in. Could it be jealousy, in addition to fear, that fuel their prejudices?
How is anyone concerned with what goes on between two people in the privacy of their own home? A popular argument is that if homosexuality becomes socially acceptable, we and our children will then have to witness PDA (public display of affection). Gay PDA makes a lot of people uncomfortable. A guy and a girl copy pasting their conversation on each other's tongues make me uncomfortable. A little kid begging me for 1000L.L. makes me uncomfortable. Terminally ill people make me uncomfortable. Wedgies make me uncomfortable. You deal with it and move on. The world is for everybody and you have to compromise and make space for others.
"So you're cool with it?"
"Of course, why wouldn't I be?"
We spent the evening walking in the park. He could relax now. I noticed every single touch and with each one I'd note that it didn't mean anything. We were just two souls trapped in two bodies which needed affection. No reading in between the brushings past, no wandering thoughts, just plain being.
By the time we returned to our neighborhood it was 02h00. Flutterby couldn't be reached and I didn't want to risk walking in on a reconciliation. He suggested I sleep over at his friend's place instead. I was shivering and too tired to argue.
"Would you come with me to the gay village?"
"I could. But what would I do?"
"I'm beginning to feel the pressure. I've been here for over a week and nothing has happened. I've never done anything, just childish fooling around. I came here so I could be free and discover what it's like. I'm still a virgin. I though I'd come here and try it with both a guy and a girl, but it's not as easy as I thought."
"You were expecting everyone to jump on you, eh?"
He smiled. "Yeah, kinda"
The mattress received my body like a marshmallow and I sunk into a deep sleep. When I rolled over the next morning, Diagonal turned to me and asked,
I've been away for a week and Beirut is now a place I come from, but don't belong in. I have never felt this myself in my entire life. The burden of being conscious of my self-consciousness has been abolished.
You know when you're sealed up in your car or walking down the street and listening to music no one can hear? You know that feeling of self-awareness when you're mouthing the lyrics of the song or moving your fingers to the beat, so as to project the act of listening to music to others visually (as if the headphones weren't enough)? You know that moment when you catch yourself about to look around you to see whether the others have recognized how up-to-date or sophisticated your taste in music is? Orwell's 1984 has inspired me to call this doubleselfconsciousness. But you see, I only came up with this word so that I could let you all know that I read modern classic literature and that you could admire me for it and that I could self validate myself by projecting my own image of who I'd like to be unto what I think the reader will be thinking. It's a loner's game.
So imagine the constant buzz of doubleselfconsciousness and how it impedes personal growth, and imagine it disappearing. My first taste of freedom.
I was walking down the street towards the tram station. The sun was behind me, burning slowly and stretching my shadow over the cobblestones like a stocking being pulled up the calves.
I loved being on my own. This was my first solo trip abroad. I had never been to Bordeaux before. Surely, I would have preferred it to be Paris, but my parents had conveniently watched Irreversible beforehand and had instantly grow allergic to the idea of me taking a Parisian underpass to safely cross the street...as though rape didn't exist elsewhere.
I looked up. Looking down was a shirtless smiling man. I smiled back and continued walking. Half way into the Place de la Bourse, I turned around and he waved back. Now waving is harmless an act, but when you are always on the lookout for others' validation, validation of iTunes playlist, of LV handbag, of your intelligence, of your hipness, of your superbness, of your uniqueness, a harmless act like that can seem like an affirmation.
[The guy to my right is playing chess on his MacBook Pro and shaking his head and lightly motioning with his fist at the bishop, as though inviting me to cheer him on and commend his mastery of the game in order to make up for my victory and his defeat in backgammon at the beginning of the trip.]
So he waved, and I imitated the gait of a rooster, and he imitated me with his upper body rocking back and forth over the window sill.
My tram arrived. I bid him farewell with an exaggerated arc and watched him disappear as the tram moved forward.
That night I watched an adaptation of Romeo and Juliette. She called to him from her window too.
The next day I returned to Rue Saint Remi. I looked up, but he wasn't there. I approached the entrance door to his building. He was on the last floor. M.Tournant. I ripped out a page from my notebook and drew a little sketch of a guy waving from a window. "Je cherche un M.Sans Chemise. Appelle +33.........."
I waited nervously for a phone call. Nervous. I received a text message.
"Salut, c'est moi, M.Sans Chemise. Comment tu t'appelle?"
We exchanged a couple more messages where we established that he was 27, and I added a couple of digits to my age, that he was a student of medicine and that we would meet the following day in a cafe nearby.
That's when it hit me: I had no idea what he looked like, but more importantly who he was! I rummaged through all possibilities to find the most extreme ones, rapist, serial killer, perv, and I laid them down on the table. What was I thinking meeting up with a guy who I found cute...four floors high up?
The next day I was so nervous in French one-on-one class, that I shared the entire story with my teacher who called me "une folle"...but encouraged me to go anyway. Curious people want to know how a story develops at whatever cost, the large sum being paid by you.
So after class and a long walk about town to calm myself down, I headed for the meeting place, not after walking around the block twice. But he was nowhere to be seen. I turned to leave and there sitting on a table was a T-shirt covering the chest of a man with a charming smile.
The story doesn't develop much from here on after. We had a great time together, my French was -surprisingly- impeccable, we shared the same taste in music, blah, blah, blah. Do these things even matter?
The first taste of doing something stupid and getting away with it. It wakes you up to who you are when you ask the right questions. Why did I do it? What do I need? What was I expecting?
Back in Beirut it's never these questions. Can I do it? Will people find out? What will they think?
These questions too are revealing, like X-rays showing a broken spine.
A hum like a well-oiled engine, hum like the ocean, and then a note rolls in, recedes, builds up, recedes wavering, bass buoyant on a surface of light...
Shimmm el ya-a-smi-i-ne
W dou2. El debs
The quaint hiss of the last -s did it for me. Hamed whispered surrender into my ears, sound surrounding us in our loss. I have seen him always serious and always from afar and that never helped to understand him. Too serious, discrete, like in hiding, and then rebellious and revolutionary, like a rockstar, like always one part of a diptych, the other, a part of a myth.
And then that momentary hiss of an -s. Nostalgic. Sincere. Serious for a reason. Discrete for a reason. Rebellious for a reason. Revolution that follows loss, and it resonates in me, because I'm going to lose. Soon.
Bi t7eeni.
Itzakar.
Itzakar.
That's when my throat begins to hurt, to turn hard the walls of the hollow tube that empties the insides of my stomach, filling it up with the sense of falling when I think of meeting Imaginary Extraordinary Him. His cheeks in my palms, his warm breath condensing above my upper lip, our lips fusing like mitosis in reverse, the rough wet surfaces of our tongues feeling each other's texture, mine slipping under his into the humid folds beneath his tongue and then giving his tip an upward nudge with the tip of mine, pulling his upper lip from the inside, so that it's far out enough to deliver my terminal nibble. That.
Itzakar.
And now it's not about anyone specific, it's about loss, not mine, but Hamed's. It's about a voice.
That, I'm drunk on that.
I lean backwards and close my eyes, feeling the left tear spill over the eyelid and the right one trying to catch up in bursting. I focus on their course, instead of their cause; the metawaterfall too physical, too overwhelming, like a bag of jumbled Scrabble letters, like a mirage of thoughts swirling in a cup.
The pulls exerted by his voice pull at my tears and they cusp my jawline. My hands cup his face like they did when we first met and they hold him long enough to say goodbye without actually saying it.
The whistling, the strum of the guitar encourage me to go through with it. Do it. Do it. Don't back away. C'est la vie. Nothing lasts, only moments that feel like they last forever, and if I will have to say goodbye it will only be because I said hello.
And the dreamy lyrics tawajli albi. It'll be worth it. Even my albi.
I'll buy the ticket. I'll cook him food. I'll iron his shirts. We'll name our kids. We won't make them, but we will make love. We'll forget to forget.
Bass inta bi baitak.
W ana bi Beirut, bi baiti.
W bainetna el bahar.
But now that I'm here, I'll go make memories that I will try to unremember the day when loss will become too much to bare and Hamed's voice will fill me up and soothe the pain.
Skimming the tops of trees, teasing the surface of water, caressing the harvested golden down of wheat, a tiny airplane ripples through rolling landscapes. Its sister, reflected in the blue glass, powders her cockpit nose in the face of wind, leaving behind puffs of exhausted vanities. The always lagging thunder that follows betrays its peaceful gliding and for a moment the people down below are aware of the plane up above, but perhaps not so much of the people in the seats and never of you, sitting in 36D.
The body of the aircraft shakes like a just-touched Rembrandt thigh. I pause to check that we are not losing altitude and resume my rigid sans cible stare as the vibrations wane into a reassuring hum.
Flight attendants slide the raided trays back into their slots as we fly in parallel to breakfasts on wooden tables and morning coffee on sidewalks. Strapped to our stiff seats by seat belts that would bow their heads before their automobile comrades, we are breaking the curse of our featherless arms. And so are the hundreds of other passengers flying over land, ice and water.
I try to tap into the collective consciousness of this planet, hoping to be aware at once of its day and night, rain and sunshine, sands and rocks, winds and caves, bakers and butchers, gluttony and famine, orgasms and abstinence, raves and prayers, croissants and sushi, oligarchs and war, wide avenues and walled-in communities, silverware and paper cups, sexy black trash bags and oil spills, elephants and jellyfish, funerals and weddings, a baby born in India and a baby dead in England, McDonalds and Italian mothers milling about in their cucinas, Argentinian cowboys and The Naked Cowboy, ballet classes and working the rice fields, smell of freshly brewed tea in Kerala and ground coffee in Brazil, sewage and blinding white Grohe toilet bowls, an ant on my kitchen counter and a cockroach at my neighbours', the size of Russia and the size of a human embryo, Mahler in the morning and Mahler in front of a fireplace, bottled water and wine, sip, sip, crunch, munch, slurp, step, tread, slam, sigh, sniff, cough, sneeze, fart, wince, TURBULENCE, heart drops to tail bone, speed of plane exceeding expectations, shit, something fell, am I going to greet the world below as a pancake?
Khaiii, for a moment I considered air crash. In that case, I'd imagine my heart would start drumming, but I would remain calm, close my eyes really tight and start letting go...I once heard that sleepwalkers are more likely to survive a hard fall than those who are awake. Why is death teasing me these days? No. Why is my mind so aware of it? This was just customary turbulence, with the same soundtrack of seat belts being fastened, flight attendants' footsteps hurrying up and down the aisle, the pilot telling us to return to our seats, the radio crackles peppering his speech quarantining him in a far away safe place, away from vulnerable panicky us, making us all want to tell him to shut up because what does he know sitting in his invincible cockpit that will detach upon engine failure and drop him to safety in Zagreb where he will emerge a hero from beneath the red exhaling parachute.
This invention of flying never ceased to astound me. I am in awe that if I decide to wake up in Tokyo, I can catapult myself a couple of hours into the future and be there to greet the rising sun.
The labour in my grandparents' orchard would wake up at 4am, mount their donkeys and hiccup the mountain side, so that they could start the day's work at 7am and finish at 4pm, so that they would be home before sun down. By then I will be all the way across the world.
Checked my schedule and it looks like I will be free to pick you up from the airport. Natrik.
Red had always been a man of few words, but he was also one of the few men I could depend on. We went out back in 9th grade, we barely kept in touch and the last I saw of him was over a year ago, but here he was waiting for me. I gave the memory of him a tight hug.
Technically school sweethearts don’t count if they don’t survive graduation, but Red was a little different. He is so careful about what he expresses and to whom that when he opened up to me back then, I knew it was a gift I was to cherish, safeguard and take with me to the grave.
He was one of the “cool” guys. His pants hung low, his walk was signature, he played soccer during breaks, he didn’t talk much, he listened to rap, he carved stuff into his desk, he would talk back to the teachers and he was dating one of the girls from the group I hung out with.
I was the introvert of the group myself and maybe that is what drew me to him. We became friends, if friendship meant chatting on MSN or talking on the phone for hours after school. Soon enough, I realized I was attracted to him, but he was “in a relationship”, if being in a relationship meant holding hands in the cinema and having access to the bra fastener. Definitions and boundaries were different in the –teen years.
We felt that we had a lot to share with one another and that we genuinely cared. Following complaints from our parents regarding the long hours spent on the phone, we came up with a solution:a notebook that we would use as a cross between letters and chatting. I’d write in blues and pinks, and he would write in black and red, and we’d sign with tags that took up half the page. Within a week, his girlfriend/my friend grew suspicious of the intention behind the notebook. We played innocent. I wasn’t going to break them up. I wasn’t going to break the unspoken rule. I tried.
And failed. I lost a friend, but got myself a boyfriend. He was the jock, I was the nerd and we were cute. We were so cute in fact that our first kiss came six months after the official start of the relationship. It was an issue we talked about, but the more we did, the more nervous we became and less capable of making the first move. It didn’t help that most of our dates were group dates or that my mom just happened to want to watch the same movie. “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” was different. We went to sit in the back by ourselves, and somewhere near the end of the movie, I finally lingered close enough to his lips for him to kiss me. Sigh.
What followed were make-out sessions in the staircase of my building or in the boys’ bathroom at school. Keep in mind that this was Dubai, before the world knew about it.
Our relationship was limited by parents, school and society, but surprisingly it lasted for a little over a year. We broke up because I had met Lulu and wanted a man and he met Rebound Girl and fell in love, but it never ended on bad terms, we just drifted apart. He changed schools the following year and ever since, I haven’t seen much of him…
…he did however come to Beirut last summer, and it was a punctuation mark to an open sentence.
I wonder whether he’ll be expecting another exclamation mark when I open my mouth tomorrow
“Khalas. This is it. I am going to be a drive-by curiosity.” I thought as I jerked forward with my eyes on the rear-view mirror. I didn’t have enough time to judge the speed at which the Honda was coming towards me, but it was so close that the H was already beyond my view. I remember thinking that Dad didn’t know his car was about to be sandwiched.
Chips, crunch.
I looked at the dashboard, no air bags, I looked at Dad, he was intact, I looked at the front of the car, it was inches away from a bumper, I looked at the rear-view mirror, and there was folded blue metal, a genie of steam, a white bubble and a lady in a black and white top rocking back and forth. My dad was already out of the car and on the phone and the lady seemed to be okay; she had the air knocked out of her.
I reached for my seat-belt, only half-ready to see the damage done. I looked at the front first: nothing. I walked towards the back expecting the worst; the Honda stood behind, mauled and with the engine making a loud whirring sound. Our baby was relatively okay, though not without bruises and a trunk that needed a good shove to close.
There was no blood. Nobody in the five cars that had collided was hurt. Everyone was smiling with relief, not a swear word was exchanged. A possible tragedy turned out to be a parody on female driving. Although it must be mentioned that only a quarter of an hour ago, we drove past a guy who had driven his entire car unto the flower bed.
That’s when it hit me. Death could come so suddenly, I wouldn’t even know it. One minute I am here, the next I am gone. Simple as that. What struck me the most was the mundanity of it: it will not be grand, it will not be heroic, it will not be memorable, and it will not necessarily hurt! It will be just another accident, just another trigger for a couple of 7arams and then life will reconfigure itself around it, the blood will dry, the bodies will rot and eventually the memories will fade away until there is not a single trace.
A crystal bowl is filled with candy. A candy wrapper grooms itself in the bright light of the display cabinet. Its paper is blue and shiny, and makes one think of new beginnings when touched. In its neat folds there is promise of something bigger than itself, of something almost perfect. A hand hovers above the bowl for a moment, two fingers zoom in and the candy wrapper feels the warm consequences of its destiny. “So this is what glory feels like,” it thinks as it catches the light so attractively it leaves no room to doubt its chosen” one-edness”. The fingers drop it into a pocket and it is the only candy wrapper in this pocket and the pocket becomes its kingdom. Being a ruler seems to come so naturally, it almost feels effortless. All of a sudden, it is pulled by its hair, crumpled into a ball and thrown in the waste bin.
So don’t get any big ideas about being special. Don’t expect to go out with a bang and a marching band. Death is as mundane as a fly sitting on a wall. Death is as uneventful as an empty page in your schedule. Death is simple. On. Off. Almost desirable amidst the chaos.
“Tu sais qu’en deux jours sera notre anniversaire de 30 ans?”, she asked, the smoke following each word.
“Wow”, I replied. Should I tell her that I wowed all relationships that lasted up to and beyond 3 months? The words were about to fly out of my mouth, but I withheld them just before take-off. Keep your commitment issues to yourself this time. The last time we spoke about love was half a year ago, when I was still attending mass with The Pope. Only recently did she find out that The Pope and I were long ago committed to the pages of history.
“Is there any difference between say the 15th year and 30th year of being with someone?”, I wondered out loud.
“Bien-sur, ca evolue, ca devient plus fort. C’est tres fort.”, she answered, leaning her head forward and turning her chin towards her left shoulder.
I looked across the table at her husband. He was still handsome, with gray hair and a whitish beard, slightly tanned skin, eyes tired but sparkling and a gentle smile that was hard-to-read. He wore a stylish double-button jacket, its light blue colour brought to life by the mustard yellow leather strap of his wristwatch. His kind deep voice was worth just as much. He considers me as his daughter, but I sometimes wish for him to be unmarried.
I looked back at her. I couldn’t imagine either of them with somebody else, they fit really well. She was the kind of lady who always looked elegant, who encouraged me to be strong, but who never confronted her husband in public, who never spoke about herself in fact and here I was witnessing a foxy dreamy smile that spoke of a different woman altogether as she uttered, “Rien n’est plus beau que la passion” under her breath. I barely grasped the words they were so hushed.
I have seen that look on her face once before, and have wondered ever since if she had not taken on a lover during some point. I have also seen, a countless number of times, the way she looks at her husband and I cannot imagine her allowing herself anything more than a stray thought.
30 years! A war, three kids, a grandson and a granddaughter in the belly. 30 years. That’s longer than I have been on this earth. WOW.
I tried to remember what the 3 months with The Pope were like, how did I not suffocate, how did we keep it afloat?
All I can recall is the beginning, the love-making and the moments we had taken pictures of. The rest is a blur, or not long enough to fill up a span of one hundred days. Give me a couple of moments…
…it’s all coming back to me now.
We woke up the next morning broken. It had been an exhausting yet loveless night. Not only had we gone back home late, but we stayed up talking about the La Connasse incident and talking about us. He tried to hug me when I had put out the lights, but I resisted until I felt his abs and chest on my back: his skin was killer. He could overthrow the Johnson & Johnson baby. He certainly made me take back my words. See, I was one of those prejudiced cretins who thought that chest hair was the zenith of attractiveness…until I touched The Pope that is - it was then that I forgot the nightmare of the hairless rat I lost my virginity to.
Neither of us wanted to leave the other. He didn’t want to leave me alone with my thoughts, and I didn’t want to be left alone to them. We went to Paul for a late breakfast; it would only take a couple of please before the waiters would give in and bring us bread and jam, which is idiotically served till midday only. Full and lethargic, we plunked down with the rest of the Sunday crowd to watch Avatar in 3D. That was our romantic afternoon.
Back home and alone, everything came back to me, including my pride which I had somehow managed to shut up the previous night. How could he do this to me? How did I let him get away with it? And all other fairly typical questions that cross a cheated gal’s head. So how did I deal with it? I wrote him a letter.
I wrote him a letter that was a little extravagant, a little too poetic for the simple message it was trying to convey. His English was good, very cute when spoken, but not enough to read me beating around the bush with a Shakesperean quill. Alas, he never understood my text messages that ventured beyond “Where are you”s and “I miss you”s. It went the same for me; I thank Larousse and the French slang online translators for allowing us to communicate over the phone. So to understand me better, he came over the following day.
We read the letter together. He would read a paragraph, ask me to explain a certain this or a certain that and then give me his point of view. We did this for the nine or ten paragraphs that the letter was made of. I was travelling to Paris that night and I wouldn’t be back before two weeks. We separated on a positive, yet uncertain note.
I missed him, he missed me, and before we both knew it, we couldn’t wait for my trip to be over.
“Je veux te rammener de l’aeroport,” he told me. It would be the first time a lover would greet me! I don’t know what I was more excited about: seeing him again or experiencing a movie cliché.
I landed twelve hours later only because I lost track of time in the duty free shop and missed my connecting flight from Frankfurt. An extra six hours of waiting for 50ml of skin foundation, guilty as charged.
He was waiting for me just as how I had picture him, in his leather jacket, with his tousled hair and looking out of place because he never waited for anybody.
“Tu m’as trop manqué,” he said squeezing the air out of me.
He had to return to the airport in a couple of hours to see his friend off. We dropped of my bags at my place, I grabbed a fresh change of clothes and we headed for his flat. His friend was already up, packing his things and shooing my cat out of his suitcase. I said hello before disappearing into the bathroom. Nothing comes between me and my shower.
They were ready to leave by the time I dried my hair. We loaded the car and went back to the airport. By the time we got there the sky was already beginning to show signs of a new day to come. They hugged, exchanging a couple of words and his friend trundled off into the departure lounge to return to Paris.
I offered to drive; he looked depleted. I suggested we go to Tyr and he did not resist so long as I agreed to drive us back and forth. He fell asleep by the time we reached Khalde, and he would wake up every now and then just to see where we were. The highway was practically empty after Saida and the desolate scenery that stretched out before us basked in the splendor of the rising sun. I hadn’t seen something so beautiful and moving in a long time.
I’d turn to my right every once in a while to take in the comfort of the sleeping Pope. He was entirely at my disposal and whatever upper hand I gained through this, I wanted to use it to take care of him and shelter him. You could say that as my lover fell asleep he awoke the mother in me.
We walked around the old town for a while. Our camera attracted a small group of kids who took it upon themselves to show us around. They showed us where they lived, where they played, where their families went shopping in the old souk and where they went diving in the summer. The walking, the intensifying sun and the hubbub of children wore us down. We found ourselves a table at a café overlooking the sea and ordered some coffee. It was January, but the heat, the azure blue waters, the sandy shore and the palm trees spoke of a different time and place.
The coffee gave us enough energy to walk back to the car and drive to the entrance of the Tyr Nature Reserve (separated by nothing more than a street from what seems to be a plastic bag and tire plantation). We dragged our bare feet along the path, over the wooden bridge and unto the warm sand of the shore. The Pope collapsed as soon as we spread a piece of cloth on the ground. I threw my clothes into a pile next to him and ran straight into the waves. The first contact with water was like running into a wall. The cold seized my entire body in one tight shockwave and I let out a noise that is usually reserved for The Pope’s and insomniac neighbours ears only.
It only took a couple of moments before I felt one with the sea. All my senses opened up: my eyes saw high and wide, my ears heard every drop crash and every shell drag, my nose smelled the sea, the tall grass and the city, my tongue collected the salty droplets and brought them in to spice up the traces of coffee and dough, my body felt the push and pull of the sea, its cold grip, its soft caress, its mass and its foam and I felt limitless and alive and I ran into and out of and along and I jumped and I rolled in the sand like a madwoman.
I collapsed beside him and he woke up for long enough to put his arm around me.
“T’es toute mouillee, et froide. Viens, viens…”
I heard voices. I raised my head to see. There was a family, or two. One kid was carrying a kite, the other a plastic bucket and the parents were carrying small backpacks. They did not look local, which was a relief since I was in my wet underwear and trapped beneath a sleepy arm of a male siren.
It was then, with my wet and shivering body against his warm side, that I felt the desire I had kept locked up for two weeks suddenly jump out and lock me in a trance. The entire world receded in a big whoosh, like water retreating from a rising submarine. I wanted nothing more. At first I allowed myself a nibble on his ear, a few kisses on his neck, but I hadn’t vouched for the same beast to take over him as well. Lying on our bellies we struggled and the only force keeping us apart was the sharp children’s laughter only a few meters away from us. Just enough decency not to perform.
Defeated and famished, we got back into the car. He fell asleep with his head on my lap, and I held him close against me whenever we approached bumps and dips in the road. It felt nice to know that I had it in me to be gentle and caring. There is so much aggression out there that it hardens you up and rapes you of your altruistic instincts. Before The Pope, I was at a point in my life where I was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to succumb to my feminine nature. With Mr. Keller, I couldn’t stand being in the same bed as him, if he’d touch me, my breathing would become pronounced with rage and he would ask me what was wrong, and I’d tell him to not touch me and he would retreat into his black hole of rejection and I would stay awake all night wondering what the hell was wrong with me. It took his tears and a look of complete dejection to move me. Now, I only needed to look at The Pope and my blood would turn to wine.
That night, like so many others, we spent stealing each other’s hours of sleep. I could summarize those three months as a constant state of sleep-walking in a day dream. I am still compensating for the lost hours with afternoon naps.
Three months. Thirty years. How wonderfully exhausting.
