Peace for a city bulging from an abundance of everything and depletion at once… Politics and its vacancy… Revolution and uselessness… Prosperity and vagrancy… Asylum and rightlessness…
A city bulging from an abundance of paucity… So it is life and agony…
Peace for a city whose communities are on an equal footing… Its roads and «ways» are crooked… Its camps are cities… Its suburbs are countries… Its bridges are prisons… And its sea exiled, not lapping its feet but on a grain of sand whose whiteness was almost tainted… So it is solitude and harmony…
Peace for a city where you can come across all kinds of humanity and discrimination… Secular and sectarian… Its walls filled with letters of love and exile … Whose traders of labor have been honored with a medal of «no honor»… and given my name, Elias–in the area where I reside–a pass or «no conviction»… while my work has been the gateway to a world of humanitarian causes and to a number of believers in them and activists defending them… So it is liberation and slavery…
Peace for a city that no culture has left without settling safely amongst those who wish it and who reside in the city… Breathing life in corners, roads and hallways with art, an interest or a unique hobby… So it embraced them as a group of tribes practicing various rituals… So it is sound and image…
Peace to a city used to parting with sons who had taken their first steps in its alleys, who had learnt the alphabet at its desks, discovered love in its shades and dreamt of a cedar that would build them a homeland… And endlessly leaving it without regrets… So it is emancipation and nostalgia…
Peace to a city where between its high rises an old house is rooted here and there, left to grow old alone in its hideaway… Its sons have left holes for kisses on its forehead–in memory–before departing… Its balconies crumbling from the weight of time passing and its windows sagging in despair, once destined to cover its eyes so it could sleep… I walk by it and I hear it sigh in sorrow over the city’s history choked with a rusty lock… and I see it faltering in anxiety over the day when the stones of its stories would be taken apart… to be replaced with steel and concrete that have never known… So it is history and apostasy…
To Beirut…
A wish and a greeting and nothing more…
For Beirut is not keen on embraces or perhaps has grown sick of lovers who had betrayed her… Today those who desire her are many but she fears them settling her heart…
Its suffocating traffic… Its clamor… Their clamor… Drives me to flee… Creates an abyss in the soul that cannot be filled except with visions of the past as if a specter… So I return only to run away again… And the abyss grows and I find myself drowning in its specters ever more… as if it was a dream…
It sometimes happens that as I’m wandering the streets of Beirut I see my reflection in the glass of a passing car, and in an epiphany, I am alerted to the fact that I live here!
That was the strangest thing I could have imagined…
«I live in Beirut»!!!! It was neither a choice nor a coercion… That’s how my relationship to Beirut is…
I don’t know how it started, nor why it goes on…
Beirut is cruel…
Cruel for its proximity, cold as fear…
It gets crueller every time I return from a vagrancy and thought myself closer to that place… but found out that I was further by a life…
It is cruel for its blunt honesty… It does not flatter… It does not embellish the ugliness of the truth…
For no matter how I try to be close… I won’t make it…
Yes, Beirut is cruel… But it is beyond tender… And I’m grateful to it…
I would be ungrateful if I isolate myself and blame her for my estrangement…
She has so many secrets that she opens to her residents–to those who seek–doors to life and to the self…
She has given me, the stranger, a space to dream and get lost… To look for myself every time her sun rises… To build myself a quasi-belonging in a quasi-asylum… To be the closest I can get to hope…
In her, I met a great number of friends that not even my homeland had offered me… I saw in them a homeland of human beings… They wept with me when I wept over my memories there… And we dreamt… So no border, visa or passport can steal our dreams…
My stay in Beirut has turned my world upside down… My stifling isolation, my solitude–albeit, relative–has brought me face to face with the question «why?» that I’ve always escaped… So I found myself panting in search of a new meaning… A new value for what we call «life»… and I still do…
So boundless gratitude from the heart, dear Beirut…
Not as a settled resident… but as a step on the way back… the way back to tomorrow… the tomorrow that is closer to the past…
Return there… To Aleppo… Peace, embraces, and all the nostalgia remain…
And hope that tomorrow is not filled with houses locked with waiting… their furniture is absence… their memories forgetfulness…
Their dormant memories today are orphaned without those to remember them… To revive them… To weep over them… Slumbering in a drawer, a box or a book.