No one will ever forget a single step they took in these alleys and streets. Unfortunately this country that has forcefully occupied a part of the heart will merely be a stop where we will remain for a short time only and will only leave it reluctantly.
The city that did not only become a neighboring geographical spot has allowed escape to it from the death circle that was slowly closing its jaw. Even over the remains of the bustle of what it had lived through in the middle of the past century, it is still beautiful as seen through the eyes of a child, who sees it only as a big green mountain, and a sea that can carry away all this isolation crowned with the beauty of Beirut’s colorful streets, that would never harm anyone.
* * *
I really long for Damascus with all its old walls that are being eaten away like we are eating away at each other away from them. I really long for Damascus like I long for Beirut now while living in it. Here when you let your imagination go a little, while sitting in one of its cafés, its streetlights move away from you. When you look at it for the last time from the window of a plane, everything will seem so distant, everything that will follow it will seem ugly. Only those who have really loved Beirut stay, just as I walked its streets and learnt who this bereaved was that everyone was talking about, it is the love of Damascus that is found here everywhere.
* * *
I wish I could go back a little, just to those few hours I had spent at the border to cross here. Not for anything but to discover the city anew. I still remember the first time I walked down a street full of elderly people. They were right with their laughs at my slightly dirty and torn pants. Lebanon will recover despite everything, in dirty and torn trousers, in suits and offices, everything but those camouflage uniforms, they do nothing but create wounds that no one gets used to.
I wish I could go back to walk again for the first time down a street running along what remains of the blue sea. It is that same sea that has swallowed greedily those who put on life jackets and tried to flee. It blue color only comes close to Beirut’s permanently open windows. The music that emanates from each window is totally different from those raging drums that beat daily in Damascus. And Damascus is always forced to listen to them, just as Beirut once heard them too and has turned them into those voices that sing to this day to suppress that destructive impulse of so-called «man».
* * *
Every day some artists go out – whether musicians, painters, filmmakers or theatre directors – all together and try to throw all that the blackness that the war has left through their works. They try to cover all that smoke with the colors of freedom that is fighting to come out and expose fifty years of injustice. The first step of this exposure has been Beirut. Beirut has opened it galleries and theatres to them, and they just had to do what they were good at. It gave a chance to what would have only been a wooden box in Damascus. They survived indeed and succeeded with failure to be the protagonists embodying their work. They transformed everything into things that empty all the years of oppression in minutes. They forced out of Damascus, so Beirut embraced them.
* * *
We all stand here in Lebanon on the bank of a dream, trying to intensify our presence so we have a stronger flow to achieve it. We ride all the boats that sail every day from the old ports in order to catch what remains of the ruins of the dreams of all those who have fled by sea and not reached the safety of a land. They remained there amidst the details of what they left behind of cities, villages and streets, which eagerly awaits the return of everyone. We all stand here on the bank of just dead nostalgia, trying to make up for it with love for Beirut.