1982 revisited?
Last night the electricity went out in Philadelphia for a couple of hours. I was almost nostalgic lighting up the candles around the house. In the dark, anywhere could be Beirut.
But then one of the candles burst out in flames; the wax itself was on fire, the round top of the thick cylinder was ablaze. I tried to put it out, throw water on it, but that only made the boiling wax splash onto my hand. I tried to sleep, with my hand dangling in a bucket of ice water, but I just couldn't. Underneath the pain I must have sensed something in the air, a whiff of the news I was to wake up to.
Today my nostalgia took a darker turn...
posted by arch.memory @ 9:35 PM
5 Comments:
I don't want to go back to candles.. they do more burning inside than light...
very good post, Arch.
Ah, Eve... I am worried sick now. My parents and brother and sister have left the Dahyeh, but my cousins are refusing to, their mother is battling cancer and don't want to be running around with her... And my other cousin is in the South stuck at his grandparents, and my aunt is going crazy with worry about him naturally... I don't know... How quickly 14 years can drop...
tell them to take care. 3an jad. it's better that your cousin stays where he is instead of foolishly trying to cross to beirut. hopefully things will get calmer. don't worry, Ashraf. or at least try not to...
I am sure all of us abraod are trying our best to, and not being very successful... Distance is tricky that way, it's always like looking down binoculars, one way or the other. Except this time I feel the object of our attention is huge to begin with...
See, the problem is my family lives in "Hizbollah Land", which--as true as it may be--I find very condescending, as it happens to be the place that I was born and raised, and have always thought of it as an integral part of Beirut--in all its ugliness, and always will. And my family happens to have a place to go to elsewhere, but hundreds of thousands of people there don't. And it's not like the fact that these people live there makes them a fair target. Some empathy would do us all a lot of good at this point.
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