This year, your birthday letter will be heavy. It will be sad. It will be angry.
But it will be relieved that you are not here.
This is the second year in a row that I say that. I say I’m happy you’re not here.
That thought hurts in itself
Take from that what you will, when someone prefers the fate of the dead than those who are living.
Where to start? You already know the beginning.. I started it last year, and although there are some good things to mention, it seems we were cursed to continue with an unfolding like no other we could have imagined.
Less than a month after I wrote you, 28 days to be exact, I had just gotten home from work, excited to show Laith a fishing game toy I bought him earlier. You know the old school one with fish that bop in and out of a rotating lake, opening and closing their magnetised mouths while you attempt to catch one with a little tiny rod.
As I kneeled at the coffee table, with him excited to see, chirping and squeaking, a loud noise shook the glass of the nearby balcony doors. I stood up, and Mama who was there looked at me saying “earthquake??” I grabbed my phone to check for the news, moving away from the coffee table, and told her “No, no. That’s a bomb. They’ve blown someone up.”
What happened next was a mix of quick thinking on Mama’s part, fate, and pure luck.
Thinking it could be Israeli war planes, Mama grabbed Laith from next to the coffee table in the middle of the living room, and started towards the inner hallway of the house, calling out to me and Louis to run to the hallway, incase “more bombs hit closer to us”.
She was no more than three steps away from where we were sitting, when all the glass in the living room shattered and flew furiously inwards. Where Laith had just been.
Seconds passed that felt like minutes of trying to comprehend and realise what happened and picturing what could have happened. Where Laith had been sitting were large sharp shards of menacing glass, over the table, the carpet, embedded into books and board game boxes that were in the book case. (6 months after this, we were still finding bits and pieces of glass behind books and in corners…)
Laith crying out at our panic and shock shook me out of a daze, and I grabbed him and ran into the inner bedrooms, pausing on the way to see a huge plume of smoke rising into the sky. It was towering above, in soft pinks and oranges that were almost beautiful if it weren’t a sign of something so much more sinister.
The port had blown up Baba.
And with it, blown up half the city, its people, its walls, windows, and peace of mind.
Outside, car alarms were blaring, glass was everywhere, ambulance sirens and people shouting.
And we were no where as near to the port as other areas.
Then the images started to filter through the TV. The phone calls to check on everyone, the phone calls checking on us. “Are you ok?? Are you hurt??”
My Whatsapp exploded with messages after an eerie quiet. “Is everyone ok?? What was that!?”
"Are you ok?? Are you hurt? Where are you??"
It’s been nearly a year, and it still feels like today. And all the “what ifs” haunt me still, and I push them back and bury them and they manage to crawl out into hypothetical scenarios that keep me up at night and make my heart beat faster, and make my eyes water. Thoughts I dare not even put into words because breathing life into them will give them volume and space that will break parts of me that I already have to hold together tightly.
And we were the “lucky ones”.
The government had sat on 2,750 tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, stored in a metal warehouse, in the middle of Beirut. For 7 years.
A ticking time bomb.
And it had blown up and taken the homes of 300,000 people, the lives of over 200, and everyone’s memories before that day.
Everyone lost something or someone, somewhere that day.
The days and months that followed brought with it lots of agony, anger, sadness, uncertainty, and in small ways hope, as the Lebanese did the thing they had gotten so used to doing over all these years with irresponsible leaders: they started to take care of themselves and others around them.
We swept streets, and boarded up broken windows, and checked on elderly, and distributed food and medicine. The country united under a mushroom cloud of terror, leaning on one another to stand up to face another day.
In all this, I’m glad you were not here. One less heart to break over the ghost of a city.
And the snowball kept rolling, and gathering more and more dirty snow, as months went by with no help, no support, a falling currency that lost over 90% of its value, power cuts that now last most of the day, lack of basic medicine and formula for babies, food costs that are eye-watering high, poverty increasing at alarming rates, and petrol shortages driven by want of profit that lead to days upon days upon days of lines and lines of people in their cars snaked all around the city waiting to fill up what they can so they can get to where they need to be the next day.
The view from here is dark Baba. I’m telling you all this, but I don’t want you to hear it.
It will only hurt you. It will only break you.
It broke us.
The anxiety, the stress, the worry. It becomes numbing after a while.
You see so much around you that makes you want to implode, that you become catatonic. You have to, to survive. You walk in and out of days, hoping the passing of time will bring with it some sort of relief. You blow a bubble around you to drown out all the words people utter, the pain they express.
It's been so hard. So very hard. Worrying about everyone, about myself, about what will happen. Where to go from here.
Things were never clear before, but at least there was a path outlined that made sense, felt safe. Now it truly just does feel like a dark tunnel, and we're just feeling our way through day by day waiting to see that distant light at the end to guide us through.
Thank goodness for Laith. I don’t know where I would be without Laith.
What a force for survival he endowed upon us, despite it all.
I must remember to thank him when we are out of this all.
And on the way, another grandson for you (see, I did say there was some good news!)
A brother for a little lion, although I won’t lie and say I didn’t desperately wish for a girl, perhaps to relive my childhood, the happiest of my years.
But two boys it will be, and two boys I will raise and love and nurture to the best of my ability… Two boys for you to be proud of.
So survive we must, and to do that, an exit plan from a country that despite our love for it, our hopes for it, our attachment to it, has become a tar pit that is dragging us down, and I can’t let that happen. Not with a family. Not with my family.
So come bouncing boy number two, we are moving to Cyprus. To start from scratch.
I’m terrified but excited. Anxious but hopeful. Scared but determined.
And although I’ve said it time and time again this year that I’m happy you’re not here to see all this, and worry alongside us, and suffer alongside us.. a big part of me really needs you. If only to tell me it will be ok. Nothing else.
But I’ll have to make do with the you I have within me.
I’ll stop here, there’s no need for more. This is heavy enough.
Baba, next year, the letter will be better. It will be happier. It will be worthier.
It has to be. It just has to.
Love you always, love you forever.
Bintak, Im il subyein,
Karma
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