220319 — DOWN-TOWN BEIRUT, BEIRUT, LEBANON
You can all meet her in a party, in any party, in fact. In a floral dress and velvety brunette locks cascading down the sculptured curve of her back. She loves painting her lips with rouge, but there's no regular shade of lipstick for her - her lips are all spring vivid colours and out of them pours every happy song. You wouldn't believe it, but she knows how to dance anything anywhere at any time you want - salsa, samba, tango, ballet, waltz, oriental, tap... she catches the ends of her dress, kicks off her elegant heels and fondles the rhythm with her feet... mocks life with a smile and seduces beauty with her eyes, catching the breath of every lung to tie around her slender waist, and dances and dances and dances as the universe moves.
She's more of a bird that belongs everywhere and runs free, but nothing catches her or tames her to anything – not even a name or a number limiting the lively commotion in her chest. She has all names and all the years of age and all the raw and vulgar emotions and all the youth and wisdom and faith in light and the future. She's every stroke of an oud string and every molecule of air pushed into a clarinet. She's every blow of wind and the spirit of every trunk of a root of a bud of a flower of a fruit of a tree thrusting high into her ever blue sky.
She resides on the Mediterranean beach, cradling the sea in her arms as she lets it sleep in the deep, warm chambers of her heart. You can't help but belong to her – like a child to a mother, like a bud to a root, like a root to a trunk, like a tree to a ground, like blue to a sky, like a sky to life, like life to your heart, like your heart to your chest – her spell casts across your existence and you're hers – hers like you've never been anywhere before, like you've never loved anyone, like you've never tasted ambrosia, like you've never felt your ribcage expanding from containing too much happiness, like you've never seen anything, like you've never breathed, like you've never spoken, like you've just been brought into life, like you've just seen the world, like you've just realised how much sense the world contains... but she is the world. She's my world and your world and our world – she's the world in all of its angles and shapes and incorporeal creatures.
You can't help but feel her rushing with such sweet recklessness in the blood of your veins. She takes you everywhere – over the seventh cloud and beyond the Mediterranean sea, outside the world we know, apart from objective reality... is it the glazing youth in her eyes or is it the burning admiration fuelled by every sensation I never had (until I met her)?... We pave the roads with an eagerness I've never known – I look at her and I see that she's been there before – with a sense of revolution; a vile pounding need to drive – endlessly forward with no stops towards new turns and new roads and new birds and new skies and new clouds and new rain and new emotions and new lives – to leave everything behind and flee with her... then she clutches my hands and tells me she wants it – to give me a miracle and a new heart and bigger lungs and a bigger mind, somewhere else, somewhere where her and I belong – and I know that what she wants is all I've ever need to think about for now and tomorrow and forever.
I don't know why I love her... this beautiful city built and dissected by bourgeois capitalists, the sculpture I can't touch... I feel her in my blood and she takes me places to which I've never been, but know – with such intense certainty, know – that I could trace them like the letters of my name... I belong to her like she belongs to me, and we're both the filthy beach and the algae and the rocks and the tide and the hotels and the restaurants and the cars and the kids and the cigarettes and the smoke and the coffee and the rattling radio and the wind... everything in her and me pulsates with soul that keeps the city alive and kicking... Questions try to chase down our affinity and dreams, sceptical and rational and real – but there's a battle, a massacre, and it grows stronger as desire catches vigorous fire and a sun burns in my chest with every danger there is and every beauty that exists and all the audacity in the universe... and I fall in love over and over again with Beirut... and her colours and her music and her taste; as sweet as honey, as filthy as chilli, as pungent as lemons and as rich as a whole world... caressing the water of an ocean with my feet without the fear of drowning, parting my arms to fly without the fear of falling, loving without the fear of heartache.
Beirut makes us dinner in a small flat in a narrow building in a quiet neighbourhood in a relatively busy part of the city – in one of her many floral dresses and many high heels and many lipstick shades that never fail to draw spring in our eyes... you can wonder what's her secret, but you'll never know what makes her that immortal and that hypnotising and that powerful and that admirable – another reason why no one will know why everyone envies the beautiful woman dancing while everyone's watching, tackling life to the ground and pressing a goodbye kiss between its eyes, telling it there's no room for another life but hers.
She gazes at me and loves me, holding my hands like they'd never been held before – wraps them in satin and blesses them with kisses... she tucks me in her bed while we listen to someone playing an oud and another one singing a song by Fairuz... Beirut caresses my cheek and asks where I'll be tonight and tomorrow night and for the rest of my night life – my head rests in her lap and I don't have to say anything because she knows this is where I belong.
I don't think whether this is real or not – I don't ask if I am bewildered or in love or if they're the same, if this is all a comfortable lucid dream or reality, if Beirut's beauty replaces the indignity of the human race, or if she's saving the world from capitalism or a devil, or if she's changing the world for me because I love her... because today I am just in love with her, a city – a city of everything and nothing and anything at once... a city of mazes; a maze of sentiment, a maze of money, a maze of luck... a city of promises and dreams and broken promises and dreams and love and heartbreak and red and black and blue and green – and I am lost somewhere within her deep, red, warm chambers, singing and laughing and everything in between.
