the war ended today.

I will be the first one to announce, live from Lebanon, to the world today...
that the war is over!

there has been too many people watching this cage.
So many that we ended up behaving like monkeys.
close to humans but not all the way there.
we are now giving out pictures of our deads.. of our torn children.. stories of our tragedies...
hoping someone will listen...

Monkey talk. They are watching but not quite understanding what's going on.

so i decided today that the war was over.
we will shut our eyes , our ears and our mouths and keep our tragedies to our souls...

all the tapes you are seeing on TV are fake; they are replaying our old tragedies.
there is enough to be replayed.

I today announce:
Our sea is no longer polluted
our roads no longer destroyed
and our villages no longer displaced

and most of all, the sales season has begun!

we have managed, with the breakthrough of our sovereign state, to fix all the damages within the past 24 hours of ceasefire!

Lebanon, green Lebanon, the land of the sea and mountain, the land of the cedars
calls on you visitors!
Come all of you tourists who have been watching our tragedies and revisit our glory now!


in response to my beloved audience's support, I will still be posting the wheather forecast everyday
and daily tips on where to wine and dine,
and where to shop until you literally drop...

I thank the world for its support for this war would have become ours had it lasted a few more days.

I hereby declare the end of of it all.

Qana

To those people that make the earth their bed and the sky their sheets...

This is how Hassan Nasrallah addressed yesterday the people of Lebanon. The displaced people of Lebanon. And he said:

Those people that make the earth their bed and the sky their sheets and still live their heads high and with dignity.

We all mourne as I write these lines.

55 civilians so far: 35 children taken out of the ruines of Qana.

The sky and the earth have collided. There is no room for us in between anymore.

35 children... Hiding...
The enemy of noone.
They did not even get the time to know about enemies, about war.


In 1996, they were 112 civilians that fell under Israeli bombs in this same village.

The same village where Christ turned water into wine.

Wine turned into water again today.

we all blead.
there are no words to be said.
this is not a day to grieve.
This is a day to go to sleep.

Nights and days have collided.
Heaven and earth.
We do not know where to go.
The small things have died this time.

Hizbollah was the enemy of all.
i today praise their arms. their weapons, their brave hearts that fight without planes, without tanks, without an army nor a government...
we are all hizbollah today. we are all hiznollah today. For god has died again.. and again.

Blessed brave heart and the world still only sees their beards.

Nasrallah said yesterday after having kissed his soldiers' feet:
As for the West and the world, i thank those of you who stood with us.
but to all of you, those who did and who did not
we want to say it's alright... this is our land and this is our fight; we will die here for this is where we belong.

For those of you who are still reading these lines... stop. please.
This is the end of our tragedy.
We'll go to our own death singing .
Let the earth catch fire and the sky fall down in flames.
Armageddon has come. This is a world for the unjust; let us carry our deads in peace and sing our loss in silence.

stop watching. for this is not your tragedy.
Let this earth become a forgotten name in your thesaurus, let it be a breeze, a smell that brings a forgotten memory...
Let us be unknown heroes.

We were proud to live here
we are proud to die here
for this is the lost paradise we belong to.

Here and now

On sky news at the moment:
Medics: israeli air strike on house kills seven civilians in South Lebanon.

Well skynews, thank you for the valuable information.
The 600 casualties so far have been almost all civilians.
In buses, walking, in cars, in houses...
South Beirut is all buildings and do you think they are all Hizbollah offices?

From what i know about Hizbollah, they would tend to build offices underground.

i keep hearing on CNN "the strongholds" of Hizbollah.
south beirut they mean? this is the stronghold of poverty and people.
It is a popular area of Beirut, the suburbs. mostly populated by Shias. Yes, a great number of them probably supports Hizbollah politically . And that is because extremism grows where poverty grows.
When people have no food and no shelter, they hang on to religion, to promises of freedom and shelter.

Is is a crime to support Hizbollah politically?

Is democracry selective?
The palestinians get to vote, but they don't get to vote for Hamas. And if they do, no food for you Mr.

brilliant quote of the day by the brilliant man of the century, with a tiny obsession with "terrorism":
from Kabul, to Baghdad to Beirut, this country and these troops are offering their lives for democracy...

Thank you president Bush.
i do not hope a day comes where you have to stand and explain to the mothers and wives of american and british soldiers that their sons and husbands died in the name of something else.

The israelis refused today to allow a 72 hours ceasefire for food and medical aids to get to us...
Still the world watches and asks for more justifications on their behalf.
More talks; more fancy hotels in Rome; peace can wait.

We do not want Rice to visit.
we need rice for our starving children.

Pictures of mass graves on television.
food is running scarse.
Whole areas are deprived of food.
Still some wounded are refusing to get on jordanian planes and go to get help... We are already dead, why not die with some dignity at least...

A Saudi paralysed man walked into an aid institution for Lebanon and left his wheelchair for the people of Lebanon and crawled out of the centre.... it seems we are all the same.
His country supports the bombing of Lebanon. but he gives his wheelchair.
The last will be the first.

Is there another race?
Do we at least get the promise of another life? or are we also banned from it.

it seems our blood is a shade of red too.
my dark eyes and my dark hair bleed the same. And they bleed.
Red blood, no green flags.

In a few days, they say the country will run out of gas.
We will not be able to move anymore. Where will the aid we have go then?
Three people were arrested today for trying to sell the aid they received; it seems some governmental figures are involved... Where will we go?

War is here and now. Heaven can wait.

Lebanon's news today, July 26th 2006.

Today's news from Beirut. July 27th, 2006

All TV channels are giving almost full coverage 24 hours a day of the ongoing events.
It is the disease of wars to sit in front of the TV.

Sometimes , they play patriotic songs for us:
"I walk with a straight body and a proud head,
i walk with an olive branch in one hand and on my shoulder my coffin..."

So we dance and sing from our homes... that is when the tender bits of our wars are revisited.
When some diva speaks of Beirut, of how we hurt and killed it. When she calls for Beirut to wake up from under its ashes.

The TV channels show urgent news on the bottom of the screen;
ongoing urgent flashes to us; tragedies for individuals.
we await until our own tragedy is displaced ;
war pornography. It apparently gathers the largest audience.

I will translate some of today's news on our Lebanese screens. I will do it everyday, like a believer reciting prayer in the hope of chasing his demons.

No comments . They speak for themselves. But also no more charity and words;
The world is standing and watching.

July 26th (from LBCI, ANB, Newstvsat, Noursat..):

- The truck driver for an Emirates' truck carrying food aids is killed by Israeli air strikes

- Olmert decides to intensify the air raids on Lebanon and to focus less on land operations.

- From an Israeli radio station source: Many ministers call to destroy a number of Lebanese villages and occupy the South up the Awwali river.

And the final news... One that I do not know whether to delete and forget or to post to every single voice there is:

- The citizens of Ebel and Ain Ebel (two villages in the South) call for the International Red Cross to come and save their children from starvation , for they are at present feeding on tree leaves.......

The electricity station

this is the electricity station. This is a picture i took this morning from my balcony.

at night i stare at it, it stares back at me.

you can see the brown tank; that was bombed by the syrians in the 80s.
i was sitting in this room watching TV with my grandmother , my brother and my cousin.
my cousin threw me on the floor and threw herself on top of me before we crawled out of the house.
the first time i realized someone loved me.

it burnt all night that night.

today it has hydrogene containers under the fuel tanks; that is why some say they haven't bombed it so far.

we don't know whether it is a disaster waiting to happen.
whether it is a blessing for they fear being held responsible for the disappearance of a whole area from the lebanese map.

i hear it roaring at night. it sometimes covers the sound of raids.

we are still alive. we remain here.
it still stares meanwhile.

the lebanese army

Last night they bombed Amchit.

For those of you who wonder where is Amchit; it is a small town north of Beirut, past Jounieh and right by Byblos, the historical city, right by the sea.

i was staying this summer in a small place in Amchit, just to study.
Before that is the war started. ..
I never thought I would use this sentence again... "before the war started".

We heard the planes on their way there; my house is on the way.
We knew somewhere close would be hit.
My friends said: go to the mountain and stay with your parents. We thought it would just be casual.

We stayed.
We woke up this morning and they had targetted Amchit. again the military bases in Amchit.
Our army is the only institution within this state that i feel empathy towards.

They were never the ones to attack; always the ones to defend.

In 1990, when the Syrians made their re-entrance into Lebanon, they killed officers by douzains; shot in their heads.

The red cross, my cousin being one of them at the time, had to pick the bodies in silence; no words were allowed to be said.

I remember an officer that used to stand behind Michel Aoun in the presidential palace, before the Syrians went in. As the crowd was filled with passion and Aoun made his thousand promises of freedom and independance (before he fled that is), i, being 12 at the time, used to gaze into that officer's eyes.

He had black hair, a black moustach (which i only agreed to on him) and big blue eyes, that to me, were the only two things that carried a promise of freedom and independance.
He stood there, without moving his silent and still eyes, faithful to his mission, ready to give his life to defend "the" leader.

i spent all days after the syrian re-invasion wondering what became of him.
i used to have dreams about him.
my broken 12 years heart was broken over and over again... for i did not know whether his still eyes were still somewhere else, a different kind of still...

i never knew what happened to him since.
some say he survived, some say he died.
I hope somewhere someone still sees his still blue eyes.

He is the messenger of our army, an army unable to even defend itself.
Around 30 soldiers from our army have died so far in this fake war that is not even theirs.
They have the heart and sterngth and courage, but they don't have a single plane, not even a proper fleet.

The israelis have been bombing army targets; soldiers killed in their beds at night.
This is not a war, this is a tragic comedy.
For one army fights with cluster bombs and the other with roses layed on coffins.

no more potatoes

Today,

i put on my trousers and realized i have lost more weight.
So i decided to eat a fatty burger with french fries; maybe it would take the dizziness away.
Maybe that would get my mind off the war and make me focus on digestion instead.
And digestion hasn't been easy in the past weeks.

i walked very surely into a snack restaurant and ordered: One cheddar cheese burger and a box of french fries, hearing the valkiri playing in the background.

But the war had got there before me.

No french fries, she said.

Maybe Wedge potatoes, i asked in a calmer tone?

No more potatoes ! (and she could have continued "for you Mss.")

- No more potatoes??
- No more potatoes, the providers are not able to bring us any more potatoes .

i walked out of the snack restaurant hiding my tuna sandwich in a paper bag for my valkiries proved to be a failure.

I light one more cigarette , enjoying it for it might be my last...
and ponder on my new found tragedy...

and wonder if anyone will understand the ironic tragedy of ...having burgers without french fries...

God and the small things

A zionist, a Hizbollah fighter and a hard core american christian met in a pub...

If these three went more often to pubs, Beirut would not be embargoed today.
Like my lover said: if the world would only drink more.

"But that joke isn't funny anymore. It is too close to home and it's too near the bone"...

in the name of god.
all of this is in the name of god. a same blood thristy god . yet a god with a different political agenda.
Where is the "god of small things"?

God has died. Under 43 tonnes of bombs.
The small things remain.

One third of the victims of this alleged "war" are children.
Babies cut in half.
Small hands, small feet, small cremated bones.

They must have run to their mothers for protection when they heard the sounds at night.
They must have hidden in their mothers' dresses, feeling safe from all harm.

Mothers were not enough this time.

this is a tribute to everything that is small.
Small bombs even, ones that make only sounds and don't cut children in half.

we live in fear. we all live in fear.
but two fears, one greater than the other:
the fear of dying under bombs
the fear of surviving and having to face the days to come.

My mother, a wise woman who was taught wisdom at the price of living, enlightened me when i was young.
we were walking together, and i was speaking of my dreams, those of a young child full of potential and hopes.
She said, and that is all she said:
i have only one request.
I wish you to do something where you could follow people's dreams and make them come true.
Don't chose a profession where you would accompany people's miseries and problems.

is longing to survive a misery or a dream?
am i helping people to survive and carry their dreams?
or am i keeping walking dead people company?

Psychosis is the solution to war.
a war psychologist, a great and fancy invention we did not have in the old times, suggested the other day on radio that we turn off the news and don't watch TV for more than two hours a day.
Denial, what a great solution to everything.
i will turn off the TV and tell my friends: things have calmed down today, don't you think?

And then we will go out for drinks, in the old Lebanese fashion of surviving wars, and drink ourselves to sleep.
We have to be careful with valiums, for we might run out of them with the embargo.

Let us not watch babies cut in half.
Let us forget the small halves, the small feet, the small heads, the small cremated bones.
Let's focus on God instead. Prayer is supposed to make you serene. Or so they say. And more serenity is what we need right now.

I will pretend that these children are small "little princes" who thought their bodies were too heavy to be transported to another place, another planet, one safe from harm, from hatred, from war and blood.
A planet where the greatest friend is a thorny rose and the greatest enemy a loose sheep.
So they allowed their bodies to be torn in halves so that they wouldn't carry them along, and just ride a shooting star and get to their planet...

i sometimes envy the three men who will never meet in a pub.
They believe there is a god, and in him they might find answers to what is going on.

When i wake up, even with a hangover and a taste of cigarettes in my mouth, what i still see is
small babies cut in half, small hands, small feet, small cremated bones...

RR

the civil war revisited

When we mention the palestinian question, we always think of Palestine and the arab world versus Israel and the west.

Our history, like every history needs to be revisited.

In 1969, the "Arabs" met in Cairo and decided to solve the palestinian question... another question that is: getting the palestinians out of their arab lands.
Syria and Jordan, great defenders of the Palestinian cause since 69 were actually the first to chase the PLO out of their lands; no one wants a resistance that is not his.

And the Lebanese delegates, in the good old tradition of being merchants and pretending to be more, sold their country; they sold it without probably even reading the documents , for the sake of keeping their conscience safe from harm.

This is how the palestinian question was transported to the Lebanese land; this is when Lebanon stopped existing.
Many people mistake me for being Palestinian; they are not so wrong; i wonder if our existence is not already virtual, a fading taint, a fading identity.

The Kissinger plan. Did anyone forget it ever existed?
Did anyone notice it only took a different shape? a more deadly one?

The cedars revolution. A lie; i would very much like to point to Syria and say it's them; they have occupied our land for years and robbed our land; i would like to say it, but this time i cannot.
Who killed Samir Kassir? Who killed Hawi? Who killed Gibran Tweini?
and why?

Samir Kassir was my professor at university; the only reason i remember him is because he did touch my life; he did affect my vision and attitude towars things and people, towards education.

i know that he could have done it to thousands of youths; not through words, but through thoughts; through text; through something much stronger and deadlier than a sword.

They knew exactly who to kill; they did not target the politicians; they targetted the men who could have made a true revolution; a mind's revolution, the only kind we need on this land.

I would be giving too much credit to the syrian intelligence if i accused them of such a coup; theirs were always obvious, direct ...and not as dangerous.

It is only an ennemy of this so called democracy who could have done this; and what greater ennemy of democracy than the countries that bomb and kill a whole nation in the name of democracy?

And what greater enemy of democracy than arabs themselves?

The saudis sell us for 50 million dollars; and we take their money and kiss their hands and forget it is their redemption they are bying.
The US decides to care about Lebanon and its syrian occupation for the first time in 20 years and we also forget, kiss their hands and take their democracy.

Our author is always dead; we only project ourselves in his words, never his intentions.

The kissinger plan goes on.
The south is being deleted right before our eyes; and what we do is argue about flags and about sects and about superiority; who is phoenician and who is arab?

we are all bastards; bastards of conquering nations, and that is what we still insist on being.
were the phoenicians not merchants? we will never change.
we watch as our nation is being replaced; a parking lot under construction and we still fight about our descendancy;

Today, 10 bombs fell in front of the place i am working in.
10. we could smell them from the office. the whole building shook. And life went on. Simply because the rest of Lebanon was saf-er.

Not for long.

The greatest danger we face is to forget that every single piece of land being bombed is ours.
every single person killed is ours.

Me and you are victims and torturers; we are guilty of negligence, of carelessness.

i wish we would all see just how raceless, colourless, atheists we are. For that is our only chance of surviving. Of being an "us".

Orelse we do not need an ennemy, we can take care of each other on our own, for our greatest ennemy lies within.

inside out

i heard the saddest but also most alarming story today.

If there is a fear in my heart, it is this fear.

There is no greater fear than what one can do to others, for the demon lies within.

i remember being upset at my parents when i was child, and locking my room's door at night, fearing i would wake up and hurt them in my sleep.

This is what has happened.
This is where 1975 began.

When the hunted became the hunters and when we took our guns to protect our land...and suddenly decided, in a moment of despair , to point them at each other instead.

An old man, an old muslim man (and you will soon understand how he is defined by his religion), displaced from the South, came to find shelter in the town of Jounieh, a mainly christian town.

Having fled with only his soul and his weaker heart and limbs, this old man carried a green flag; and that is all he carried.

When politics are banned and discrimination is a fault , people turn to flags to reveal their natures.
In football, the chistians suddenly support Germany,
the Muslims support Brazil.

Nothing written, nothing generalized, yet a code everyone understands.

In colour language, the red symbolizes chistianity, and green symbolizes Islam.

And this old man, this old displaced and tired man, happened to carry a green flag.

It was not even the yellow flag with "Hizbollah are the conquerors", it was a simply green flag.

What did it mean?

What does it matter and why would anyone care!

old people project their tired souls into objects and simple presences.
Their beds become their backbones, their small cat becomes their only family...

I remember how tired and hopeless my grandmother became when the family decided, reckless to her soul, to change the living room furniture.
They took away her curtains, her old chair, her TV... everything it had taken her years to position in the exact confortable way to suit her soul...

With the last object being moved, she was already gone.

This old man had only this flag.
And it seems he was carrying his pride in his palm, after he had been deprived of all pride.

Yet, there are some who do not see souls, even crystallised.

Some young chistian men did not like his flag; symbolism apparently matters.
And symbols do not operate well in old tired faces and white beards...

They beat him. They beat him savagely. They broke his tired legs and his tired heart and took his green pride away.

This is how our war started.

When young men stopped seeing old people and start seeing coloured flags instead.

I am ashamed to be here.
I am horrified of being here.
I do not fear staying, but I fear for those who stay.

We are all hizbollah...

A brilliant man who refused to get on a ship once noticed that in Arabic, if you invert the dot under one of the vowels in Hizbollah, you would get "Hiznollah"… the sadness of God.

We are all today Hizbollah.
There is no party of God, it is the sadness of God that has fallen on us.

I, a Maronite Christian born and raised in a Christian area, living abroad for two years and doing a master’s in Human rights and democratization in Europe, a master’s funded by the European Union, declare today I am a hizbollah too.

I am ashamed of finishing my thesis, ashamed of getting a diploma mentioning “democratization”, for it is this called democratization that is now killing my people.
If I am embargoed today, kept from finishing my thesis and going to defend it, it is in the name of democratization.

I have lost faith in every single covenant, every single declaration.

The Israeli ambassador to the UN spoke of “democratization” the other day.
I since decided I was better off burning my books and my covenants and joining a resistance, that whether right or wrong, whether in my cause of others’, is actually standing for oppression and injustice in a world where no one ever does.

I am ashamed of our Maronite Patriarch who goes to visit Rice and to beg for forgiveness for a country that never kneeled, a country populated by politicians that do nothing but kneel. I am ashamed of a maronite Patriarch that acts like a crusader and distinguishes “his” people from the rest of the Lebanese.

We are all one; today, we are all Hizbollah.

I condemn the killing of civilians in Israel as much as on our land.
Why does not anyone condamn the killing of our children, our civilians, the two journalists that died so far? are they all hizbollah?
We have become, baptised by bombs and blood.

The bombs that know no civilian, the bombs that target children and mothers on fleeing buses, the bombs that target civilians all over the country, Shiia, sunnis, Christian, druzes, these bombs are what we share.

Thank god for the bombs; they are the only thing that brings us together.

Is this insanity we are facing?
Am I a puppet in a crazy game that knows no mercy and acts on parallaxes.

I see on CNN that Lebanon apparently started a war on Israel; The Israeli minister of Health goes on TV and announces more than a thousand casualties: apparently victims of what he calls “acute stress”.

Acute stress...

I was born, raised in battles. When I found it hard to write my thesis under the present circumstances, my brother said to me: you were raised studying under a gas lamp, you can go through this one too.

Acute stress. This is what we are not allowed to feel in this part of the world, orelse death becomes heavy on our minds.
Death is light; death is easy in a game of cards and scrabble on the stair cases. Death is only two days spent in an underground waiting for the next cease fire, when we go out to the street and be children again, waiting for death again...

I saw israeli children today writing messages on the bombs that are going to fall on our children.
this is the school of love today; these are our common playgrounds, on one side and the other.

Are we some inferior race that could be exterminated. Is the time of inferior races not gone?
When civilian cars fleeing villages that the Isreali defense forces asked to be evacuated are bombed by Israeli planes, killing 21 children and women, how can we believe in what they call the right to defend themselves?

If they are only attacking Hizbollah fighters, did they detect a taint of jihad in these women and children’s hearts?
Did their detectors see something our bare and insane eyes cannot see anymore?

Today, another civilian bus was hit again. The third so far; I saw a woman crying on TV: my children she said, my children she said, my children she said.
I flipped channels and she was gone, with her sobbs and her words and her despair...and her children.

The south of Beirut looks like a living tomb.
Something unrecognizable; a few old ladies still live in it; like rats, they must hide and feed on dead bodies, for the smell of death is all that remains.
A whole civilian crowded area is now a ghost city... apparently still hosting hizbollah.

Is it god they are looking for?

Still CNN claims the Israeli counterattack is being quite precise and they are only targeting Hizbollah hideouts.

Insanity is what it is; theirs or ours.

We are crying on our hills, for we don’t even have shelters to run to.

The whole world has fled, TV stations and phone radars have been bombed.

Yet, it takes us an audience to know we are not insane; to know we are still alive.

When noone is listening, hearing, caring , all we hear is the echo of our mad voices.
We do not exist anymore.

I am not a soul, I am not a tree, I am not a dream.
I am a liar, inventing an excuse for my insanity.

This war is a lie.
This war does not exist.
This war is only memory.

Bring me a leather couch.

This text does not exist.

mornings in Beirut

i woke up at 6 this morning. the light wake me up. it has become a consolation to see the light go up on this spot of the earth.

when i checked the time, i knew i had to force myself to fake sleep again. Days have become too long.

the first thing i do when i wake up is look from my window, my wide window that hosts the sky; i used to love this room because of its window.
Now, a part of me feels too close to the sky, too close to the neighbouring sea.
And there are strange fish and strange birds in this sea and sky, ones that carry metal objects that hurt.

my morning activities go as such:
i jump out of bed and check the electricity station is still there, unharmed.
then i go to my brother's room and i check he is there, sleeping.

And now, i can start my day.

i can see, as i write, ships evacuating the remaining foreigners from Lebanon.
it has become a consolation to see them and hear their helicopters pass over our house; they are a small guarantee that we will still be alive, for a while at least.

i saw on TV this morning a man boarding a ship dressed in a "union jack" flag. i wondered for a long time why he would do that.
he already got on his ship, was he trying to remind me there was no room for me on that ship?
was he praising his country for saving him from a country on fire, from hell itself?

when i was abroad, for months, for two years, i listened to feiruz singing:
take me plant me in the soil of Lebanon
in that house that watches the hill
and i'll open the door
and kiss every wall
and kneel.... under the most beautiful sky.

did he not see this sky? did he not taste this soil? did he not see a grandmother returning 20 years later to her land and planting a flag of thorns and memories in her small garden? did he not have an olive tree that waited for him since he left it when he was three?

maybe he did not. maybe it's only me.
God save the queen who makes it her personal business to facilitate every british citizen's passage throughout the world.... and out of this world again.

Yet i know one british man who refused to go. one british man who stayed and wanted to embrace this thorn filled sky and kneel on this mine planted soil, and pretend even for the small time of a war, that he was us, like us. i saw his tears. his tears as he stayed and his tears whilst they made him leave.

he was us.

will we soon become an olive tree and a grandmother and a brother and sister and a memory shaped hole in the sky?

In 20 years, when you will come and visit this land that might have a different name by then,
remember we lived.
you will hear our voices on the walls, you will taste our ashes in the soil, and see our dreams in the sky.

come fire and thunder and birds and fish on a mission, we remain , awaiting, for this world is ours no longer, a world of fire and thunder and birds and fish on a deadly mission.

incommunicado

C once sent me this word of the day, on January 23, 2006:

"incommunicado \in-kuh-myoo-nuh-KAH-doh\, adverb or adjective:
Without the means or right to communicate."

i spent last night at my parents' place in the mountains.
a place up at the highest point in the area, north of beirut.

It's not a fancy place.
i used to call it "cocoon"; if you've seen cocoon, it is a movie about aliens who at the end take back to their planet a group of old people with them, to give them eternal life.

That is my parents' place; old people mostly, and families, spending summer playing cards and throwing backgammon tables at each other in a moment of defeat and anger.

i just saw on TV that they bombed that place. not the hotel itself, but mobile network radars next to it.
my parents are staying in a room that is hosting them and 5 members of my cousin's family right now. they all fled beirut and are staying there, with small means but much love.
they lay mattresses and sleep every night and wake up to two beautiful children singing and being children.

i fear for my aging father as he seems to adopt more and more of the children's behaviour.
i fear for the children as they adopt more and more of his.

they are, despite being crammed and living a simple life, lucky in these times.
the village is now filled with families that have fled the south.
they are living on the streets, next to the public fountain.
all that can be done is offer them blankets and mattresses.

and a smile when available.

today, the children must have stopped laughing.
i have been trying to contact any of my parents for one hour and cannot get through.

my only consolation is the only TV station that is still operating, as they bombed the other next to my house. They have not mentioned any casualties.

The safe harbour is no longer safe.
i heard planes, but i do not know anymore planes from the screaming electricity station gazing at me as i type, reminding me that i am a longtime dead.

i heard the explosion. i saw it disconnect me from my loved ones.

i sit. waiting for some news.
with a pain in my stomach. a pain i cannot express or detect. yet a vivid pain that reminds me i'm live.
are we alive?

rr