052: grief as a kaleidoscope

Before you scroll down to this month’s dispatch, I’d love to direct your attention to The Sameer Project. They are currently doing life-saving work in Gaza. If you are in a position to direct funds their way, I urge you to do so.

In Beirut, the menus are dollarized, and their items are listed at prices that rival New York. It’s been like this for a while. The local currency has been reduced to a passing mention traded to the tune of millions. “How much to Beirut?” I ask the cab. “1.3 million”, $14 USD. Prior to the collapse seven years ago, this sum amounted to $867 USD. The large stacks of bills and endless lines at the currency exchange have dissipated since I was last here. Banks have begun releasing people’s life savings through little trickles.

In the morning, I crack eggs that come from a nearby farm. I watch the deep orange yolks sizzle in locally sourced olive oil, opaque, yellow-green and sharp. A thick layer of dust crowns the tops of salt and pepper shakers I got from Mexico a few years ago that have since sat unused on the counter. The beauty of dust is that it shows us time passing, F said to me a while back while I was fretting over cleaning chores. But time terrifies me. It is the universe’s only invincible thief, the biggest guarantor of loss in a world that abounds with it. I’m scared of how it will claim my loved ones, scared of the distance it keeps putting between me and my memories. And yes, I know theft isn’t the only thing time promises but in this city, all I see is anticipatory grief.

There’s the anticipatory grief of loss that seeps through my parents’ slowed gestures, their aged faces that bear in their creases, a lifetime of hardship. There’s the anticipatory grief of a country that lives in foreboding. “They’re probably coming back. It’s good you’re leaving soon,” my mother says calmly, mostly to herself. “They,” the israelis who never need be named. The doomsday specter that has hovered over the land for decades. The one that has not stopped bombing the south, which many in the country have forsaken in exchange for the illusion of a promised peace.

There’s the unprocessed grief of the many tragedies that have torpedoed through the land. The many houses in the south reduced to untouched piles of rubble no one can clear due to continued bombing, read: occupation.

*

Conversations with friends reveal that time is textured by tragedy: “M’s daughter is a little over two now. Yeah, that sounds right. She was born a couple of weeks before the genocide.” “Haven’t been to that place since the [economic] collapse.” “Haven’t heard from [person] since the explosion.” We’re having this conversation at a local Hamra