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.
