It’s nearly two months after the Beirut explosion. This blog has not reflected how much it’s been on my mind. The horror of what happened, in a long line of terrible events, is very persistent. Partly because I did fall in love, or at least in fascination, with Lebanon when we stayed there, and to see the photos of places I enjoyed – and the shattered building that we lived in – is painful. Karantina, especially, that old slum / refugee camp / site of hideous massacres, where we walked one afternoon, and felt as though we had entered a different world, moving at a different pace and with different expressions on people’s faces. Then, I am currently working on something from Lebanon, which has me doing dozens of calls with people in Beirut, so it is always at the front of my mind.
Today, though, was the first call with someone who was unable to shake off her trauma for a call with a foreign stranger overseas. All those till now had mentioned the explosion, but were able to partition it off for the meeting, but with her the conversation kept circling back to what had happened, so that she said she could not even remember what had happened two months ago. It was a break in history for her, a moment when she realised that her life till now had been a lie, that she had thought she was at home, even home in a place where terrorism and civil war had reigned, but that home was built on an ammunition depot and she had gone about her business – sleeping, eating, working – unaware that at any moment she and all she knew could have been ended.