Note: Written in the fall of 2024 for LACC’s Anthology (Vol. 1)
I tell my father I need a ticket to leave Lebanon in a week. Years later, when he tells me he’s building a house on our village’s hills for me to inherit, I don’t have the heart to tell him I won’t be coming back. My uncles undertake the construction. My mother chooses the doors and plants the trees. It takes pain and years.
Before the flight, the shower is the only place I cry. When I arrive in Boston, I greet the taxi driver – speak – and he asks me where I’m from. Years later, in Los Angeles, nobody asks me that anymore. It takes pain and years.
I don’t see my parents anymore, but I think of the tobacco fields; the large green leaves whose main vein we would thread onto thick twine so they can hang under the bright sun until they’re dry enough to crumble. I think of the trees full of fuzzy green almonds. I look for the same almonds for years on a new continent. Finally, I find some at an Armenian store in Glendale, but they don’t live up to the memory. I think of the olives we would shake off the branches with all the might in our little hands. I think of my aunt’s black rock crushing each one. I think of all this, but my father relentlessly builds his house and each brick he lays is taken from the life I could have lived instead. With each brick, I acquire a new phoneme, until my R’s and T’s don’t raise questions in my new life.
Then Nasrallah’s dead.
You are being nice. You ask me how my family is and how I’m feeling today. For a second, I consider not switching code; how it would take so much weight off my chest but also, how it would put so much weight on yours. But you are being nice, so I decide to be docile. I don’t force you to take the leap today. We do this dance. I follow the script; make sure you understand, I wasn’t a fan, show you I’m reasonable. The faux pas it would take on my end to go from one of the good ones, in your eyes, from “you don’t look like you’re from there,” to a barbaric mouthpiece for terror, is miniscule. Later, I resent myself because I understand that I, too, want to think of you as one of the good ones and that this dance we do is not for my sake alone, but for yours, too. I leave no room for you to tell me who you are today. I realize, in heartbreak, that I already know who you are, because you’re asking the wrong questions.
It seems that Lebanon is all I really want to talk about these days. I keep a Post-It note pinned above my desk that reads, An individual identifies most strongly with the aspect of their identity that’s under attack. It helps guide me in my writing. Nasrallah’s dead. I truly was never a fan but I cry because his death means you’d kill me too.
You ask me how my family’s doing. I tell you my brother was on a date in Beirut the day before. You have a blind spot for the valley between fucked and fine. “So it’s not as bad as they’re making it out to be,” you tell me in a moment of joyous epiphany. “I’m glad your family’s fine,” you add. See? You’re one of the good ones. One time – it must have been some years ago now – we shared a drink and you said you’d come to Lebanon with me. I wish you had.
It hits me in the middle of the night, right as I’m starting to see my first dream, that every childhood memory of mine takes shape in a place they’ve destroyed or would destroy; that if I take you with me now, and I show you where I stayed up all night dancing, you won’t see past the gray rubble; and I panic.
I call my parents the next day. They turn on the phone’s camera and show me where they are.
“This is where we’d plant the grape vine,” my mother says, and she points up the outside of the tall, unfinished cement wall. “It would climb all the way up to the roof,” she says. My father is behind her, distracted, already looking for something else to show me. They put a metal arch over the driveway. They started laying stone over the brick on the facade. There is a particularly strong brand of heartache saved only for watching someone build through destruction. My friend from back home calls me next and tells me her girlfriend’s family was killed when they bombed the evacuation route overnight.
When I get your usual text, later, and you ask me how things are, I will tell you about my friend’s girlfriend’s family and you will give me condolences and say, “that’s so sad!” and I will tell you about my parents’ house and you will say, “that’s great!” and you will be wrong on both accounts, and I won’t tell you this, because you are being nice and I am being docile. I will walk among you in unrecognizable grief until you ask me the right questions. It will take pain and years.