We Lebanese

1.

Our hug is inappropriately long.

If we weren’t in Lebanon, or if you weren’t about to leave this land, never to return except for the visits we’re already talking about, it would’t have lasted like that For minutes. Wordless. On a rooftop overlooking the sea, while an ABBA remix blasted and glasses clinked and friends danced around us.

This is how it is in Lebanon, where the people who can do so come and go, especially after jobs and during wars.

We don’t say more, after the hug. We don’t need to.

I turn with our other friend and walk away, waving, swaying our hips to the music of so many goodbyes.

2.

They say there will be another civil war.

That now that our government has handed the south of our country to Israel, we will turn on each other. Like 1975-1990, but with deadlier weapons and live streaming.

There are so many who want peace. Who love and care for each other, no matter each other’s god or holy book or headwear.

They say that America has won. That Israel has won.

We make dark jokes about this—me, and people who have lived through much more than I have. Who have seen things I haven’t.

We board planes and leave. We land in planes, filled with excitement for a Lebanese summer. We live in tents by the sea, and we leave tents by the sea. We return to destroyed homes. We stay in hospitals. We wonder what might happen to us.

3.

The night we met, under a full moon next to the sea, you spoke to me about God. About a conversation you had with each other. About going to a therapist and then another and asking if this meant you were losing your mind.

You didn’t know that this is my love language.

That these were the verses I’d been waiting to hear.

Here in Lebanon, people of certain means have live-in help, even if they are not incapacitated. There are so many problems with this system, I could spend the rest of my days writing about nothing else.

But when my father became unwell, I became his legs and wheels. I got his groceries, chased down his medications, got yelled at for driving the wrong way in parking lots. I stopped sleeping and eating, and started overreacting.

I knew that if we didn’t get help, I was going to need two therapists.

We found you through an agency suggested by the wife of a colleague’s best friend. The lady who ran it went by “Madame”. She referred to you, also, as “Madame”. Even though you need a step stool to reach the cupboards in my dad’s kitchen, Madame you have remained.

I tell my friends that you’re like the mother I never had. Most of them don’t realize this is not really a joke.

You help my dad in and out of the shower. You speak to me in Arabic and laugh affectionately at my blank face and tell me that this the only way I’ll learn. You make the best tabbouleh I’ve ever had.

When I go out, or when my father goes to bed, I hug him, and you stand in the doorway and hold your arms open for a hug, too. I give you one, and you giggle and do a little dance. You video call your sister and niece each night, thrusting the phone in front of my face while I’m eating chips on the couch.

“Speak English!” you exclaim, pointing to me. “Bonjour!”

This is your job. You spend time away from your own children for this. I wish that weren’t true, but I am so burnt out, I just swing between gratitude and guilt.

1.

At your going away party, before our inappropriately long hug goodbye, the two of us trip off to use the bathroom.

A man in uniform sees us coming.

“Welcome!” he announces. “Please!”

Gallantly, he swings the door open.

We smile at him, and at each other. We know this is the way of things here. This is how you get treated at places like this. This man probably makes as much in a week as the group of us will spend on dinner tonight.

We hate that.

And yet, when a man in uniform opens the bathroom door and welcomes you in, it’s hard not to smile.

When Madame clears away my breakfast dishes and cares for my father far better than I could, it’s hard not to believe that somehow, this is a life I deserve.

3.

Last week, you and I also said goodbye.

No one was leaving, it just wasn’t working.

I laughed more with you than I had with anyone in years. You asked the best questions. You kissed like the stars. And you told me, point blank, that you couldn’t give me the consistency my nervous system insists on.

As I waited for the elevator to go home, you stood at the doorway of your apartment, making sure I was okay, like you always did before I drove or walked away.

The elevator didn’t come.

I shifted my feet back and forth.

“Go inside, please,” I said.

“We Lebanese don’t do that,” you said, and my heart flattened and slid out onto the tile floor.

I jabbed the elevator button again. Still nothing.

Finally, I nodded at you like we’d just closed a business deal, turned, and took the five flights of stairs of your building by foot.

1.

I call you and tell you the whole story the next day.

I don’t have to. We haven’t been friends long enough that it would be expected. But I don’t want to pretend that it hasn’t happened. I don’t want to pretend anymore, period.

Also, we spend so much of our time together tackling The Big Things of this country that this is our balancing exercise. We talk about our love lives and eat sweets.

“I’m kind of sad about it,” I say, when I’m done, which is a watered down version of the truth: “I feel like shit and like a total fucking idiot.”

“Please don’t judge me,” I add.

“I would never judge you,” you say, so gently I almost melt into tears. “One day you will find someone like him, but who can be consistent.” You say it with the certainty of an older sister.

The thing is, this isn’t about finding someone. This is about how there were no footnotes to the story. Nothing about ailing parents, white phosphorus, end-stage capitalism, live-streamed genocides.

Never mind finding someone.

But your words mend something whispered inside me.

I send you a voice note that night, thanking you for being there for me. You send one back moments later, saying the same.

I let a few tears fall.

And across space and time, I send you an inappropriately long hug.

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