On the bus, a notification!

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

(*artwork by Incé Husain)

On the bus, a notification: “children among casualties” as Israeli air strike hits southern Beirut - follow live updates. At breakfast at the grad club, a notification: “Rampage”: Israeli attack on southern Beirut kills at least nine, injures dozens - follow live updates. I click the notifications, read quickly. On my plate, I stare at the ghostly fissures of a slit orange. I stare at a colourful painting of a clock tower on the wall. I drink French vanilla coffee. I walk to my claustrophobic building. I wrote to X, to Y, to Z, to W, to Q, to R. I wrote stupid things: are you okay, I hope you’re okay, that your family is okay, that your friends are okay, if there’s anything I can do, anything, something I can write, tell me. It took me an hour and a half to try to eat half a breakfast. My coat around my shoulders, my heels and blue blistered feet. I want to run away into the woods. I can’t breathe in this building, this building of my dreams. I want badly to cry. I walk to the bathroom stall, this grey place where I pretend the walls are made of marble, and stand with my forehead against the cold door until I’m lulled into dullness. In the lab, everyone is typing rapidly. B says something about a brain imaging toolbox. I sit at my desk, type things, install packages, find inconsistencies, fix them, fail to fix them, try again. I do this for four hours. Neon-coloured lines of code against a black screen.

The world is burning. The graphic novel, Beirut, on my desk at home. Nostalgia, pain, the Golden Age, newness, joy. My heart cannot bear this. How am I meant to catch this history, this pain, this momentum? I cannot even know myself fully. I want to preserve humanity, its grace and its urgency. There is no difference today between writing and screaming. I feel like humanity is ending. I want to bawl for its extinction. This pounding in my head is also neuroscience: it is gurgling neurons, it is proof of life. I’m in the right field. I’m thinking of Y and Beirut. Today, I’ll bite my thumb till the skin breaks. This is my act of solidarity, the kind I can’t help: I’m here, I’m there, I bleed with you, I’m not in this building, I’m wherever you are. 

My species is going extinct. I study the human brain; we don’t even know the scope of what is going to be destroyed. I feel pre-dead. I’m studying the pre-dead. Mass injustice breeds love. Is my body too small to hold the amount of love that could compensate for this violence? I wrote, about the Pakistan floods, “I make the oppressed a piece of me. I give them voice and narrative inside my life. My body can be the lost land.” I wrote, on October 13th, “I need proof that the history I know exists. I need it to live in me and through me, written on the pages of my blood for every newspaper that refuses it.” My body is finite.

I buy peppermint tea and run into the woods. I watch the river, the leaves that glow with sun. The dirt is sand from the summer flooding; it fills my toes in their sandals. I called my parents and began to cry. The trees blur around me, an orb. I wring my hands, pace in circles. My parents tell me that history has seen mass violence before. World war two, Vietnam, South Africa, the invasions of Lebanon. What’s happening now may yield greater things to come, we don’t know the plan, the Great Plan. “The human cost is too much,” I sob. “Y. His entire family is in Beirut.” Crows watch me. I see a blur of purple flowers, yellow flowers. I teeter on the steep steps to the forest path, purging. My parents tell me to think of my voice, to make a name for myself. Cry, grieve, recover. 

I enter the building surreally, eyes red and mud stuck to my coat. I fail to make my code run. I pack my bags. Z writes me back about Lebanon. And now I’m walking to the bus stop and we’re talking about Tripoli. He fills my head with wolf songs, canyons, swimming near islands, houses stuffed with cousins and play, the blur of the new and the ancient. He says “there is nothing that will compare to that childhood”. I read about Beirut. I search the web for a scholar in London who can tell me about the interconnected histories of Lebanon and Palestine. I find one. I plot an article. I think of three ingredients: historical context, how people cope, what they remember. The interconnections between them. I walk home beneath the red sun. 

It’s midnight and a group of young white men hurl insults at the Uber driver that C and I have called. The Uber driver is young, bearded. The car is full of Urdu music and a scent I know - thick, sweet, smoky incense. I close my eyes and I’m in Lahore. I’m trying discreetly to figure out if he’s Pakistani. At a red light, he asks “May I ask where you’re from?”

“Pakistan. And you?”

He smiles. “Where do you think I’m from?” 

I was trying to gauge by the music. 

“Are you Pakistani?” I ask, but I know then that he’s not. His accent is different. His features, subtly, are different.

“Afghanistan” he says.  

“I like your music.”

 “I was in Pakistan.”

 “Where?”

 “Islamabad. I learned the language for the three months I was there.” 

We start to speak in Urdu. We both want to go home, across the sea, to be welcomed, to be absorbed, to reverse time until the premise of why we’re here and not home is overturned. 

“I’m sorry about those kids who were rude to you in the driveway,” I say. 

“It’s okay.” ♦