I, The Divine

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This city is cold, slushy, and gray. It is only November, but the people have already journeyed inward. The never-quite-familiar labyrinths of city streets overflow with people going somewhere else, a sea of moving humanity. The trees are bare, forcibly divested of honor. Autumn carpets the ground in colors of decay. Ominous clouds dress the solemn pedestrians in gray-colored spectacles. With lonely eyes, she notes the subtle images of death and destruction. Here, she may be the only one with eyes to see.

In Beirut, death’s unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night’s Russian missiles, brighter than a baby’s smile. An interminable war rages. The city is warm, fall still hesitating at the gates. The brutal winter winds are still dormant, but drafts of deadly violence permeate the air. The city braces for the upcoming winter without its heart and blood, no electricity, no water. She wonders how her child will endure.

She feels alone, experiences the solitude of a strange city where no one looks you straight in the eye. She does not feel part of this cool world, free for the first time. But at what price? How can she tell the difference between freedom and unburdening? Is freedom anything more than ignoring responsibilities, than denying duty? She walks the morose streets, circular peregrinations that leave her soul troubled. Lost afternoons. Yet she cannot go back there. She does not feel part of that world either. She never did. The family she abandoned is there. Her husband. Her child. She will put it behind her. There will always be there.

In New York, she can disappear. What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity? Beirut offered no refuge from unwavering gazes, no respite from pernicious tongues. But her heart remains there. To survive here, she must hack off a part of herself, chop, chop, chop.

In America, a colorful national newspaper is born in time to report President Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs, while the war in Lebanon is shown in prettily colored pie charts. Snipers shoot innocents with cyanide-laced bullets, while here they lace Tylenol capsules with cyanide. She walks to class confused, tugged on by both worlds.

Can there be any here? No. She understands there. Whenever she is in Beirut, home is New York. Whenever she is in New York, home is Beirut. Home is never where she is, but where she is not.