House Arrest

I never thought a city would take sides in a breakup, it never occurred to me that I’d be splitting the city with her some day, marking my spots with x’s and hers with o’s.

It’s all in my head, though, this diplomatic response to murder. The x’s and o’s don’t exist; a white winged dwarf named Cupid didn’t go rogue and double-cross me.  

The miniature boar never soaked his arrows in a pot of love elixir before lining up his shot; all I needed was a regular arrow to make me jump onto the intimacy bandwagon, I had already dosed myself with enough desperation and emotional dependency that even I had the little idiot fooled. 

The writings were on the walls all along, I just chose to dye them with her favorite colors.

The sun made a statement the next day by rising a minute too early, and there it was for all to see, the paint was dry; Badaro was hers and Hamra mine, the rest of Beirut was still in the dark, awaiting diligent external delegation. 

I wasn’t off the hook just yet though; like the city, I lost custody of my trail of thought, not out of favoritism, but rather, out of sheer frustration towards my reluctance to grow functioning ears.

Underneath this creaseless peace blanket, a woodpecker kept mistaking the insides of my head for a soft cedar tree, allowing me to believe she was going to pop up everywhere I went, building on this mental civil war I’ve overwhelmed myself with.

That obnoxiously loud clock hanging on living room wall finally had a purpose, it was pacing towards the eleventh hour; I knew a coup was coming. The walls jumped at me from behind, pushing down my shoulders towards the cold tiles under my feet, all while my thoughts rummaged towards the kitchen, rummaging through the drawers looking for the knives I sharpened the other day. It was their way of making me walk the plank. 

And just like that, I was court-martialed, facing a jury made up of my cat who had just turned one, last year’s calendar, and an alarm clock that was never lucky enough to get fixed on time. 

I didn’t have to wait for the verdict to know what was coming next. I called in Bukowski to sanction one last thing. I forced the little lion to put on his mane and stand guard in the hallway while I locked myself up in solitary confinement. 

It had been two days since I opened my prison door; even though I live alone, the apartment was roaring with change.

I accidentally started my own twisted Standford Prison experiment; Bukowski mistook his mane for a crown and my home for his jungle. 

I pressed down on the door-handle and pulled the door back, enough to let my head out. I found myself awkwardly sticking out in between my 23 plants, which were now uncomfortably standing in a perfect line with their wilting back-leaves crammed against the wall. They looked like they were waiting for some sort of scheduled assessment. 

The air was dry, it was unusual. I was so engrossed with my own thoughts for so long that I misjudged a household power struggle for a coming-of-age friendship between cat and plant. 

Word began to spread down the row that I had finally opened my door; whispers and muffled cries started leaping from stem to stem, as if to escape a forest fire at the head of the room, begging me to put an end to this petty crusade. 

Then I saw my cat, now a self-proclaimed king. He carried himself differently; the empty power I placed in between his paws had infused with his dormant hubris, making him out to be something he wasn’t.
Everyone saw a mad king, but I saw a kitten I rescued from my university campus. 

I put my hand out, snapped my fingers twice, and anxiously stuck my lips together to whistle a suppressing incantation.
Ps ps ps.
And just like that, the mad king’s reign tumbled as he wobbled his way towards me.

Aquarium Delirium

I never really counted on finding life-long friends in a city like Beirut - the kind you’d introduce as Uncle or Aunt whatever to your non-existent children living inside your head.

Who would’ve thought I’d be lonely in a place overpopulated with self-loathing fucks like myself. Who would’ve thought I’d find a friend in an abandoned street cat.

I was never properly initiated into Lebanon. There was no rite of passage. All I did was move out of campus and walk into the first overpriced, sad-excuse of a studio. And that was it. I had barely spoken Arabic to anyone other than my parents and siblings. The same can be said about ordering take-out over the phone. At the ever-gleaming age of 23, my stutter socially haunted my every step forward.

My cat, Bukowski, wobbled his way into my life after the pandemic made my world much smaller than I had always assumed it to be; my best friend moved to the US and I broke up with my recurring on-and-off girlfriend who had become my ‘person’ over the course of our relationship, and all that threw me into a whirlpool of a finger-on-lips quiet kind of confusion.

There I was, lamentably approaching the realization that, yes, I’ve met plenty of people in Beirut, but none of them really came to mind when I think of sticking my ass on my yellow couch, lighting a smoke and drinking minute-made coffee out of Batman mugs - that stuff’s reserved for best friends, awkward one-night stands, and long-term girlfriends. 

While all that was going through my head, I started thinking about how it would be incredibly nerdy and cool to get a turtle and name it Donatello, the whacky purple mask-wearing ninja turtle. That was a serious thought up until it wasn’t. The thought of getting an aquarium and filling it up with pebbles, rocks, vegetation, and water was okay, but then came the thought of needing to clean it out on a weekly basis, and that’s when everything fell apart. I can barely bring myself to do the dishes - even if the food scraps clinging to the dishes are turning green under the sink.

After eventually moving on from the turtle that never was, Donatello, or whatever its name might be right now, I started desperately looking for another friend, one who actually interacted with me rather than pointlessly moved around its small square box of a house at the speed of absolutely nothing.

My cat-hunt turned into an obsession; at some point, I just woke up, looked up a pet adoption page on instagram, and started texting random people to see if the little guys were still there.

Long story short, I’m a happy father to a little annoying shit who I’ve grown to love everyday; I find myself having conversations with him and imagining him nodding to everything I’m saying as if to make me think he speaks Arabic - talking to a cat sounds comparatively sane when pushed against the notion of talking to plants. 

No amount of shredded sofa fabrics would justify adopting a psychotic purr machine, but who needs a comfy seat when they’ve got a friend for approximately 15 years?

Chicken Marinade

My victory parade around the ever-lively Doha was short-lived. The red and white blinking lights atop the city’s iconic piercing skyscrapers seem to have abandoned their task of keeping all the malevolent crap floating around from ever landing. I was left wide open to all sorts of things looking to nip at my psyche.

It’s annoyingly surprising how I always seem to think i’m completely repellent to problems that attach themselves to metropolises. Finding myself in a place like Beirut didn’t necessarily build up my immunity to mental breakdowns and panic attacks; Doha’s no Beirut, even with its world-renowned Achilles’ heel, this asphalt oasis of dreams is gluttonously vicious.

It’s been destructively difficult; my time here feels like a race that ultimately defies its nature of having start and finish lines. The finish line keeps growing limbs, taking a few steps forward, and planting itself into the ground. It’s been doing that ever since I got here; as devious as it thinks it is, I see through it, but I’m powerless in my attempts to halt its continuous prolongation.

Like marinated chicken sitting in the fridge, all I’m doing is waiting for my time to sizzle.

It doesn’t matter if you’re soaked in olive oil or greek yoghurt, with no stovetop in sight, you’re just uncooked chicken contaminated with salmonella.

With all these advancements stretching themselves from the ground up, there had to be downsides to level things out. This cloak of safety and financial security that automatically wraps itself around you upon arrival at the airport doesn’t safeguard you from everything, it downgrades your mental fortification into something that requires every kind of rudimentary subscription and city-friendly membership to maintain its upkeep. Urban green spaces are man’s way of subtly saying we screwed the pooch with ultra-rapid urbanization, but those spots of mental restoration just barely scratch the surface in terms of back-paddling on the damage done.

Life was never meant to blossom out of a desert; it’s astonishing that it did. I’m not taking anything away from human innovation, but my mental health shouldn’t be tax money.

I walked into my new job in Qatar drunk with thoughts of destiny, thinking it was all going to be easy from now on. My so-called calculated two-year plan insinuated that I get Scrooge Duck rich before ditching this place for my next money-polluted country or retirement-friendly place like Canada.

I honestly believed that money was going to fix everything.
All these man-made monuments seem to amount to all the great things we weren’t supposed to create. I don’t think human advancement came with a pay-now receipt of depression, anxiety, and poor overall health. We make it seem like we lucked-out with a one-way ticket to the Gulf, like all these oil-dirhams and riyals can buy every problem away, but it’s more complicated than that. Every profit we think we make is halved the moment it’s made and packaged from any bank of choice towards a depository fund meant to sustain a constantly-threatened facade of happiness.

Qatar, to me, felt like the long-awaited fulfillment of my self-manufactured prophecy, the culmination of my hard work through college and Beirut, the light at the end of tunnel that was my deportation, the salvation behind my stutter, I can come up with a bucket of canonical reasons as to why this job was a long-overdue happy ending to a miserable chapter in my life.

Beirut was the manifestation of all the post-traumatic stuff I had to deal with, and it’s what ultimately soured my palette for new beginnings.

My abrupt eviction seemed to have made me allergic to leaving behind loose ends. I couldn’t draw out a new blueprint for my life in Qatar with my whole life still anchored at home. I had shackled myself in transit between a tale of cities all while lamenting that same narrative.

I was mopping around saying goodbye to my cat, my friends, my house, my car, and my favorite coffee shop; I instilled in myself the tenacity of un-acceptance, my rejection of anything that couldn’t live up to the knock-off Cinderella story that was Beirut.

You can only do so much with a positive inclination and willpower. For months, I’ve been waiting for Qatar to be habitable by me. Not that I tried my best to get that process going, but I can say I gave it my almost best.

It’s not that I’m not thankful for all the conveniences I’ve been prescribed, all the things Lebanon couldn’t give me. It’s actually the realization that I grew an appetite for the daily hustle, rather than being handed everything. That’s not to say that things aren’t supposed to like that. There’s just something about Lebanon that makes you positively associate yourself to the strains of life.

It took me awhile to get used to this place; it felt like a friend’s house. I was told to make myself comfortable, but how comfortable would that be?
It was my country, but the UAE felt like that, I felt more Lebanese there than in Lebanon, but that’s the twist, isn’t it?
Qatar’s bound to turn up the same way.

Vowels

I take half-measured comfort in the truth that my mother named me after a prophet, Ahmad.

However, in truth, I couldn’t care less what my name is, I just wish it didn’t have to start with a vowel.

Though, even with that supposed blessing, I wish my mom had the foresight to spare me so much disguised misfortune to know that while the name is great, even a prophet couldn’t cure my vocal difficulties.

I think I was around three years old when I started stuttering, my big brother rubbed off on me. He used to stutter too, but he found a way to get rid of it before it got out of hand.
He kept on chasing me with this theory for as long as I can remember.

Apparently, tomatoes held the secret to my salvation. And to a kid, it made all the sense. I was a picky eater growing up, still am, but I absolutely hated anything that wasn’t a cucumber or a chicken leg.
My mom even adopted this nonconventional treatment, but she was only interested in getting me to eat better. She knew it would take more than a red gooey ball to stop me from tic-tac-toeing through the alphabet every time I wanted to speak.

My remedy was more short-pressed and effective, but equally detrimental as I will come to find out later on in life. It involved adopting another name, a word that didn’t start with a show-stopper, Ralph, for all intents and purposes as a temporary measure to bypass my stammer, most of all, when I get my coffee at the Starbucks downstairs.

Ralph came to be my name-in-distress in the most preemptively anti-Semitic of ways. My sister and I had planned a spa resort stay in Ehden, Lebanon. We made our way to Tripoli, then to Ehden via road-side buses and vans.

The farthest we could get to, according to the veteran van pilot, was the village entrance, from there, especially since it was Easter, we’d have to make our way to the resort on foot. The whole village had evacuated to a nearby church to celebrate Jesus’s resurrection and his triumph over death.

To our luck, though, as we were hiking up a hill, a car drives by, stops a few steps ahead, and waits for us to reach it. My sister and I then lower our heads to the car’s window level, the driver tells us to jump in.

As he was getting us to where we needed to be, a car-ride conversation ensued.

With the grocery list of questions usually asked in Lebanon, the guy manifests a question based solely on credible, kind-hearted assumptions, ‘Did you guys have a chance to go to mass this morning?’

My sister sat up straight and promptly said, ‘No, not yet, we want to get to the resort first.’

The conversation kept going for a while, nothing of worth came up, though.

He extended some hometown courtesy by asking us to take his number if we wanted to go around town. And since my sister didn’t have a local number, I was the man in-charge of dialing in his number.

The next question came up almost immediately, ‘What’s your name?’, he asked.
Joana replied with hers and then looked at me as if to say, ‘Oh, shit, A-hmad.’

And I knew, instinctively, that my name was treading too close to the forgotten green line.

I took a second to think, using my stutter as a diversion to keep him mesmerized.

Ralph quickly placed itself on the tip of my tongue, forcefully convincing me to blurt it out; and I did.

Even with my stammer, Ahmad wasn’t going to cut it. You never know with us muslims roaming in Jesus-fearing lands.

Ralph seemed easy to say as well as convenient, given our predicament.

The man seemed okay with it, which begs the question of whether or not he could’ve weathered my real name.

In a way, I’ve come to embrace the embarrassment my impairment has forced upon me, and rather than fight back, I’ve let myself be weighed down and cornered.
Some would flinch at the notion of being called a different name, but not me, I’d rather be called a random name every day than be subject to my own torment.

I’d sometimes muster the mettle to ignore all my ensuing facial expressions and say my name out loud, as to prove something to myself, only to be misheard for Anwar or customer #1.

For a time, I had hoped the Ahmad’s religious mysticism would seep into my being every time I was on the phone with an operator. At least then, they wouldn’t be compelled to think I was having a stroke whenever they asked for my name.

It’s a weird feeling, embracing a name that’s not yours just because you can’t say your own.

It’s a pity that I find myself envying everyone around me, disabled or otherwise, the former because there’s a global consensus that they required assistance when navigating society, the latter because they can simply speak their name.

All I get is a mathematics high school teacher laughing at a student trying his hardest to imitate me.

I don’t care about all the other letters I can’t pronounce, the English language has plenty of synonyms to get me through my days.

My name is my own, and yet, I can’t say it without looking like a fool who’s forgotten his name or an even bigger fool who has to plug in ‘my name is’ before actually saying his name to push it out of his mouth.

The self-loathing didn’t start then, though, neither had it hit its all-time low. My first and only speech therapist takes that honor with high praise, a person who was supposed to save me from my impairment. This supposed doctor pointed at all the children coming into his office as reason enough for me to stop stuttering. To him, shame was my best catalyst.

For as long as I can recall, my name’s been bullying me way before any idiot child crowned themselves the first to mock a kid with a stutter.

With that, I had tons of room to experiment, to discover where I stand in the hierarchy of an all-boy classroom; the spectrum stretched from class clown to class mute, both didn’t do me any favor in digging me out of my social destiny of being ridiculed for a muppet who couldn’t ask for a toilet break.
Even then, I didn’t realize the damage he had done up until much later. And during that timespan, I’d wake up every single day hoping that my stammer would no longer latch on to my tongue, throat, and brain, obligating every word to pay the troll’s toll. Looking back, I was a muslim kid who desperately wished Santa Claus, tooth fairies, and birthday wishes were true.

I’ve been chased around my whole life with the misconception that taking a breath would relieve me from my vocal woes.

Thinking, rather than knowing, that that might be a universal fix is relieving; realizing it doesn’t work on you, no matter how many times you try, at different points in your life, is agonizing.

My stutter and I have been in each other’s lives for the last 26 years.

It’s been an unending game of tug of war, some days, it has the upper hand, others, I do.

But I’ve made peace with the reality that this might be a life-long fellowship.

Glorifying it for something that isn’t certainly helps, giving it a narrative that allows me to be lionized in my own head goes a long way, but I’m no master wordsmith or regal poet, I’m a man trying to outrun a sombre stammer.

For now, I look ahead, towards my maybe-children.

Will my stutter be unapologetically genetic?

Holier Thoughts

It wasn’t the first thought.

It wasn’t the second nor the third.
I had hoped it would come fourth, but it didn’t.
And that’s when the guilt started creeping in.

There I was, standing in front of God, with no thought of Him rowing through my mind.

Reciting prayer and scripture as if a purposely monotoned manuscript, with no emotion weaved into my inner voice.
But I felt culpable. I didn’t know what to think back then. I just knew it was wrong; it’s not supposed to be quiet in my head when I was praying, or at least, it wasn’t supposed to feel like an obligation that, in truth, just wasn’t.

I’d anger my holy thoughts to raise their voices, but it would only let out a half-hearted murmur instead of a roar. Out of desperation and fear of 'inevitable damnation', I’d try and try again, but I’d only find myself thinking of homework.

For a time, I set aside God’s silence in my head. I recited my prayers with unusual tenacity, pairing them with all the right movements, all the while recalling all the things that had happened at school that day.

To me, and my religion teacher at school, the devil was behind this exploit. But, I assure you, the devil didn’t have a hand to play in this, regardless of his preordained life goal.

It was easier to blame the devil than point out my falling out with faith.

Even when I knew it wasn’t the devil; I still allowed him to carry that burden while I kept struggling to jump onto the path of the righteous.

My moment of hope was always Salat Al doh’r; I felt it was my best chance at finding God’s voice again. My dad would urge me to pray out of islamic parental responsibility. That urge was almost always followed up by a phone call from my mom at work, reminding, not ordering, us to pray.
I’d usually run to my sister’s bedroom out of habit; she was away in France most of the time, during my teenage years.

I’d just sit there, door closed, prayer mat and sajdah laid out on the floor, and instead of getting it over with, I’d just wait it out, hoping to God, ironically, that my dad doesn’t decide to get off the sofa to check up on me.

Making side deals with a God I was no longer praying to seemed more fruitful to me than praying for about 10 minutes, even if I was supposedly mentally jumping in and out of it.

Sometimes, though, I’d give it a go.

I’d pray, with an ironclad conviction in my heart, to carry on with this resolve until the next prayer time, but my self-belief was quite ambitious.

It’d be self-critical of me to say that I wish it was more determined, but that line of reasoning feels soulfully insufficient. I make it out to seem like I had no role to play with orchestrating my own excommunication.

To further that point, I started putting together self-imposed incentives to get myself going. My choice of prayer mats and rooms would enter my mental fold. And sometimes, I’d watch my dad pray, hoping whatever he was doing would jump onto me and latch on to whatever’s left of my holy nerve-endings and manifest within me a stout pillar of faith.

By the end of it, it felt unnatural. Almost zombie-like. Even with a house filled with islamic faith, my own felt fleeting. And every time I’d give it an earnest attempt, it would only last a rakaa’, two if my mother’s voice was in my head, three if my guilt combined forces, and I’d get to the end of it if I had a test coming up.

I eventually gave up, though, as much as I’d like to continue resuscitating my relationship with God, I gradually made peace with keeping it on life-support. Even if I couldn’t hear Him, I figured he’d always hear me, at least.

It’s not that I don’t think God’s out there. Somewhere. He just stopped speaking to me in full sentences, and little by little, they digressed to words and phrases , as if to warn me.

Either that, or I stopped having the right ears to listen to everything He had to say, words or otherwise.

I take comfort, though, almost in secret, in the reality that there’s an open phone-tab with God, disregarding the truth that I may or may not believe in him.

I don’t know how my parents, or rather, every parent, grew up with reinforced faith. I see my father going up and down for hours, praying as if to chase down heaven and reassure himself that paradise definitely awaits.

In a way, I envy the situation he finds himself in every day, if there is a God and a heaven and hell, he’s definitely getting his ticket to paradise, and if not, at least he did his best at being pious.

They did a splendid job; it’s not on them that I became what I am today. They tried their best to right my trajectory. But as life went by, and as my days grew longer with age. I just couldn’t wrap my head around this prayer obligation to an all-loving God that left it to his whims, to the best of our knowledge, to dabble with our destinies.

All that stuff about God knowing what’s better for me went against everything that holds me together.

How do I not know better? But that’s not the real question here.
The great conundrum I face at the moment is the credibility of His foresight and my constant need to give thanks for His apparent gifts.

Elhamdella 3a kil hal.

Papaya Sorbet

She’s always been a Saturday, even when it was ten past seven on a Sunday night with Thursday’s leftovers on the stove, clogged up with all the typical gloomy shit associated with the day before Monday.

She’s that kind of day that’s always been a cut above the rest of the week, prancing around the calendar year with a spring to her step, like she knows she’s better, but never felt the need to gloat out loud.

I would’ve found more common grounds with God if he pointed Saturday as his. Maybe that’s why I’m not a practicing believer.

I’m glad he chose Friday, instead; that just meant it was hers for the taking.

She’s the only good thing’s that’s happened to me and Beirut since the August explosion.

Everyone knows this city’s a dying charm.

It isn’t the 60’s anymore. There’s no longer any fairytale operating behind the scenes.

It’s a broken metropolis unwillingly tiptoeing around remission just so we can keep going.

If you look past all the crap lying on the surface, you’ll just find more crap underneath. People just hang on to pretty thoughts and prettier words because it helps them sleep at night.

It certainly helped me.

This booby-trapped concrete jungle had all of us reeling long before it self-imploded two years ago; but even after it devastated everyone’s days, my sweet Saturday seemed to sway a bit to the left and a bit to the right, but never turned upside down like Wednesday or Friday.

It’s like she kept her papaya sunrays safe for when we’d eventually meet. She remained pleasant, even with all the trauma tangled up around her; she stayed true to her nature, perpetually glittering.
Proud to a fault, my Saturday saw the need to stick out like an irritating thorn in a field of black roses. For once, everyone wanted to get pricked by a thorn. At least, it wasn’t the usual dose of corn-fed, processed happiness, or whatever we indulge ourselves with these days. She was a sigh of relief.
The truth of the matter is, she’s always been there for us, for me, even when we were trying to race through her hours.

She never had a timer attached to her ankles like the other days. You weren’t forced to contemplate whatever you’re still doing in Beirut, not with my Saturday. Not around her.

For that, she simply got rid of her ankles for our sake. It just took me a while to see it.

Even when God tried to shove it down our collective throat, my Saturday persevered, like Prometheus challenging the pantheon.

If He created Sunday to rest, my Saturday had to mean something exceedingly good to all of us nine-to-five hardworking mules.

Even when I was caught dipping my toes in a puddle of self-loathing, wickedly so on a metaphorically sunny Saturday, she’d try her mightiest to fend them off, like a lioness defending her litter from a clan of depression-hungry hyenas.

Rather than scold me by taking the sun away, she’d compel it to up its shine for my own good fortunes.

I never really noticed how forcefully good she was, until my final days in Beirut. I’d be resentfully sitting at the office, contemplating my shit-striken assignments, and there she’d be, unknowingly looking at me with her warmth, even when it was Tuesday.

I picked up this small ritual a year back. It wasn’t anything grandiose, but it gave me an extended sense of calm during a very tense time in my life.

It was just a cup of coffee under a forgiving sun on a laid-back Saturday.

She’s so much like that to me.

A breath of fresh air, even when we’re ways off any grove.

It’s as if that frame of mind seeped out through the clouds and filtered its way into my coffee, giving way to a metaphoric back-burner.

My Saturday was right. I couldn’t stop my problems from simmering in my head, but that didn’t mean I had to stare at them as they bubbled away.

I know her wonders aren’t exclusive to my unpredictable whims, but I wish they were.

The world deserves to see her glow, maybe bask in it every once in a while.

All Puff, No Huff

I’ve been around, you know?

That wasn’t always the case, anyways.

Thinking about it gets me all huffed-up with vanity, inflating me with fleeting gratification about how far I’ve come.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a ride on a high horse whilst in the company of my thoughts.

It’s addictive, though. Anything related to addiction is bad. Whether it’s narcotic or mental, say, idealism.

With my figurative ascendance finally out of mortal reach, all that poise wilts in my brother’s presence, as if to invalidate itself while he’s around.

Don’t give credence to any of my words, though; it’s not his fault. It’s not that his presence’s intimidating, far from, actually; he’s just got a much bigger horse to boast about.

Unlike myself, Tareq’s actually been around, done things my mother would be terrified of.

He always tells me, brags, more like, about how a move to Europe would be good for me. I never put too much weight to those words; the thing about him is, it’s never completely black or white, every word carries some sort of risk to it, like he’s got a glossary of double-edged swords.
He’s not one to think of the step that precedes the one he’s about to take, or the one that comes after. To him, everything’s unwillingly culpable of being a means to an end.

In that regard, Lebanon was just a stepping stone in his journey, like a gateway drug to this expansive life he’s been marinating in.

He’s a pleasant guy, truthfully. It’s just that, the devil’s in his eyes. And the struggle’s always happening behind drawn curtains.

Sometimes, it’s silent, other times, the frustration’s aggressively wearing down his face.

People who escape hell start appreciating lesser words in their everyday conversations, to the point where their quiet days become synonymous with peace.

It’s punishing, seeing a falcon soar with clipped wings; it decapitates the soul whilst incessantly feeding it.

You see, Tareq’s always idolized experiences, obsessively dependent on the notion of having as many experiences under his belt; ‘life’s too short’, he’d always say, with absolute conviction, as he inhaled whatever keeps him afloat.

I’ll admit, I always appreciated it when people talk about how much we’re alike. Underneath the persistent comical denial is true adoration.

I’ll also admit, I never really appreciated the kind of relationship he was trying to put together. I was too young and stubborn.

Like all the men in my family, I was stupid.

My brother and I didn’t really see eye to eye growing up; we didn’t even live in the same dorm room during college. All we did was constantly bitch, pitting our poor mother in-between our dogfights.

I was obstinately rejecting all the truths he was sermonizing, like a misunderstood prophet unfortunate enough to cross paths with a deafened people.

He had his way of seeing things, and I had mine. With time, we’d both realize I was going through life at my own pace, just like he once did.

I remember when he visited me in Beirut. We were both all grown-up. It was right after I moved out of Hamra.

My mother was done with cradling my shattered ego with over-priced apartments and sweetener words. She tried to wane me off of padding my pain, but she couldn’t consciously hurt her child without doing the same to herself.

It was an unbearable sight for the whole family, more than it was for me. All they could do was hope I stand back up, but I was already comfortable with limping around a life that was so ready for me to accept it.

She decided a big brother was best suited for this task, the short-tempered one, not the one I had lots in common with.

She knew what she was doing.

He’s always been a blunt hammer, when you need him to be, and when you don’t.

With all the vicious crap he spat out that night, he grabbed onto my shoulder, as if to reassure me that everything was going to be alright, and said,  ‘you can’t love the life you’re living if you don’t love yourself; stop fucking around and get your shit together.’

He never knew how to properly chew his words before he kicked them out of his mouth. I’m glad he doesn’t.

As frustrating as it is to look up to someone as difficult and mulish as him, I do.

I’ll always idolize him, even with the devil all settled in.

Retribution

I’m back.
It’s been seven years, and it feels eerie; it’s unsettling how petrol can ignite progress. My brother once said, ‘God gave them petrol because they lack common sense.’ He hit the mark; God can’t help but be fair and objective, regardless of how enlightened and educated we are, he can’t throw all his apples in one basket. Who’d stick around to praise him then?

This place is far from being the Emirates. And, I’ve got to admit, it helps that this place has nothing pinned on me, no baggage, no trauma, just the same people, with different faces, all with the innate belief that I am good, regardless of my religion, up until they find intent to fuck me over; then we’re back to when it all started, 2015.

I’m still not over it, as much as I’ve forced myself to say otherwise, all for the sake of growing up and moving on.

I felt robbed, all while hearing praises to God for making it happen when it happened; none of that made things any easier. He could’ve just stopped the whole thing, but we can’t just question that. I could’ve had the same life, like everyone who moves to the UAE to make bank. I just believed, I was more deserving; I was there first, from the start, when it was a desert and upright people, with plenty of goodness to go around, devoid of American-made hubris.

Instead, I was shipped back to Beirut, like a purchased item you’d like to return.

They thought themselves to be King Louis XIV.

Pathetic.

They thought they were the protagonists in their own narrative. Foolishly enough, God was playing them too, he’s the torchbearer in every story, everywhere. He wouldn’t let humans outshine him; wouldn’t be very godly of him.

Things looked very different from where I was standing; it took the whole thing four months to wrap itself around my head; my life couldn’t bother itself with waiting around for me, it just kept going. And even then, it took me more than a year to accept my fate. I didn’t get it, I was living a life I was not interested in living; God couldn’t bring himself to ask me what I thought of the matter? He just threw me in with the rest of the sheep he spent an eternity shepherding.

That’s just me, though. My whole family was going through their own whirlwind of problems after my exile washed up on their shores. Everyone was keeping a smile on their faces for my sake, holding up each end with kind words and kinder gestures. I remember, my mom tried playing all her cards, but everyone was too cowardice to help, but I digress. I remember we got the definitive no while having lunch at P.F Chang’s. Dad was there. I’m glad he was; mom didn’t have to go through all this alone. I was just sitting there, enjoying my humongous meal for two for one, and my parents were whispering and taking in the news. And I felt it. I knew it was bad, but I was distracted with all the food that my future mattered so little to me at that moment.

I also never got to see my sister before I left. Those god-loving, god-fearing people gave me 48 hours to pack my shit and leave. All my shit.

They wanted my brother’s head, too, as if mine wasn’t enough.

God tried to get me out of there and burn any bridge from and to. He was obviously betting on locally-bred folly to get the job done; he’d never dirty his hands with sin. That hiccup with Satan wouldn’t be allowed to happen again.

I don’t think he thought I was worth the trouble of going to war with. I mean, I’ve got to hand it to him, he put it on the white robes and ninjas, and they played their preordained roles to absolute perfection. He had my family and myself all fooled, making us believe that it was for my own good; that gibberish writes itself. I’d rather not get into it.

I’ve written too many iterations of this story. All about depression and I how I broke free from its shackles. And while they were all true to that word, they tended to describe depression rather than tackle the damn thing. It’s quite ironic, though. Im talking about these pieces of mine as if they’re alien, rather than my feelings-turned-bedtime-stories.

Even if i do end up doing this story justice, I think I’ll still be depressed.

It hasn’t been easy. I’m not glad I’m back, but I’m optimistic.

I promised myself I wouldn’t come back to the Gulf after they kicked me out; that said, I didn’t get the complexity of life back then, or how naive and intimidating my misery was.

I’m back, and God had nothing to do with it.

Pandemonium

I find myself handing out sympathy to the most preposterous things. The airport highway was the lottery pick that day. I had to feel bad for it, no one else was. Sunlight clings on to asphalt like mosquitos to sweaty skin. If that wasn’t bad enough, it had to carry more than a two hundred short-tempered people, driving cars that couldn’t wait to break down.

I’d sleep better convinced all this had a part to play with an old man spitting on me that day. 

You’d expect a testosterone-charged brawl to erupt when a car breaks down during rush hour, but instead, I got an old masochist who thinks spitting on people is something you do when you’re angry.

There I was, standing beside my broken-down car, faking apologetic smiles at people hurling insults about my mom from the safety of their cars. They weren’t really racing past me, though; traffic forced some of them to awkwardly stick around for awhile. For a second, the gridlock seemed to be undone by highway minute men, but we knew better. It wasn’t long before an idiot mistook a tiny gap for a way out.

It was finally the old man’s turn to drive up to me. The senile bastard thought I was trying to make a point about the unprecedented shortages the country was going through. Unfortunately for him, I’m no William Wallace, I’m just a guy who’s always at odds with God and His idea of good luck. 

There’s no doubt the old man’s living on borrowed time; the whole situation in Lebanon wasn’t really patting him on the back like a well-earned, feet-up-on-the-patio pension plan. Road rage was breathing hot air down his neck. Things weren’t looking colorful for him. That doesn’t mean I should garnish the whole situation with pity rose petals. Everyone’s living on borrowed time after August 4th, at least old people have one foot out the door.

My good intentions had no business lecturing me on how I ought to react. All I wanted to do was ferry this man to a sidewalk grave. I had to make sure this idiot didn’t go around spraying his mouth semen around the city. Instead, I just obediently stood there, as if embarrassed.

What came after felt bittersweet. Pedestrians started flocking in my general direction, applauding me for how I handled the situation, convincing me I was raised by saints, but his saliva was still dripping down my right cheek.  

I don’t see anyone cutting in line to take that bullet for me. It’s all false empathy, ignorantly mistaken for modern-day social sedatives used to frame the situation as something that can be appropriately overlooked. 

Say what you will about our elected shepherds and their sheep, but this country isn’t contemplating suicide because of their greed and callous hearts. It’s the eroding social code that this sadistic population has cradled ever since the October revolution started. 

It’s like we know we’re pigs headed to slaughter, but we just think we’re better; more like entitled pigs who deserve clean deaths from practiced hands. 

Exordium

Life paraded its bloodied fangs in my face for the first time when I was 11, it was its way of letting my parents and I know I might have lymphoma. 

Up until that point, life was more than generous to me, I was cruising down my first decade like a king who was just anointed by God; vacations in Marseille, pool days under the sun, weekend road trips to Dubai, I wasn’t denied a childhood at all, if anything, it felt like life was trying to cover up a cock-up I still wasn’t aware of. 

Cancer’s disgusting, especially when it finds a home inside a kid. There aren’t any silver linings to make things any brighter; I just appreciated all the love and support catapulted my way every day of the week. Suddenly, my stutter stopped being a punchline. Suddenly, I started having friends. Suddenly, that phone my mom’s boss got me was always ringing. It didn’t matter that my new friendships happened under life-threatening circumstances, I was relishing every moment of it as I pushed all the other stuff to the back of my head.

Right around that time, a rumor started going around school about me dying, had I known it would lead to the whole city calling my parents to let them know that I was in their thoughts, I probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of starting that rumor.

All I wanted to do was stock-pile more attention for when things inevitably go downhill.

That was when my parents decided to pull me out of school, more so to prioritize and better schedule my frequent visits to the hospital for lab tests and consultations. At the time, it just made more sense for me to associate that with a subjectively more dramatic reason.

Being 11 years old with all this attention shoved down my throat, I didn’t really want to ask too many questions, I just wanted to stay on the receiving end of things.

Pseudo friends and positive thoughts could only take my blissful ignorance around the corner of the block. Life finally started speaking plainly to me when it sat me down with a caped surgeon. I felt so vulnerable and lost, even with my dad sitting right beside me, the surgeon just kept talking and talking, and I didn’t want to interrupt him, say no, or ask him to repeat himself. I was taught to never interrupt grownups, especially when they had all the answers. 

I didn’t really understand what was going on with me until doctors and nurses started recognizing me in the hospital. I had hoped I’d become a regular at some upscale cafe or restaurant later on in life, but instead, I became the boy people told other people to pray for, saying, ‘poor him, he still has his whole life ahead of him.’

While my mom was making deals with God to fly me off to Mecca if He kept an eye on me, I was comparing myself to prophets and their biblical struggles while riding shotgun with my dad on our way to shave my head off.

At that point, my parents had crashed through several waves of bad news. My dad stepped back from work to be around me more, letting me sleep on their bed while he read out verses of the Quran over my head. It must’ve been so hard, being a hero isn’t all that great after all.

Chemotherapy was another monster altogether, I heard it was like any other kind of medication but this one caused hair loss. All the grownups kept throwing in half-chewed words of encouragement and pairing them with a firm hand on my shoulders to reassure me. They purposely left out all the other nasty stuff, the nausea, vomiting, pain, loss of appetite; it was just too awkward to talk about, especially when you’re looking into the eyes of a little boy trying to disappear behind his father.

From what I witnessed during my brief time in the post-op ward, this Goliath really robs your body of every shade of life, leaving you colorless and broken. I didn’t let that get to me, my mother never let go of my hand from the start. She sought out a victory in everything she did for me, even the little things mattered. That day, she had to make sure I had cable TV in my room. Yes, I was miserable, but I was illiterate towards that emotion, I couldn’t comprehend it, so she took advantage of that and directed my focus towards the simpler things in life. 

I never ended up undergoing chemotherapy. My parents claim divine intervention stopped the nurses from prepping me for surgery, but it was hospital negligence on top of doctors biting their nails trying to cover up their misdiagnosis before a lawsuit materialized, so much so that the medical director kept asking about me for years.

The story goes, the medical board signed off on the chemotherapy treatment plan after glancing over all the lab tests and CT scans; they all agreed the swollen lymph node on my neck was malignant, but it was relatively baseless. Fortunately for me, another group of doctors in Abu Dhabi came in clutch. 

Everyone was left red-faced at what had happened with me, the news climbed to the top of the chain, prompting the Emirati government to offer me an all-expenses-paid medical trip to Germany. 

To my parents, this was a step in the right direction, a way to be sure that nothing was wrong with me. For me, it was free trip to Europe with Emirates Airlines. 

Turns out my tumor was benign.