This time we have a story for you, 2020
I never thought I could get so affected.
The explosion in itself was shocking enough. I wasn’t at the heart of it, but every single person who was in Lebanon on the 4th of August at 6:07 PM knows exactly what I am talking about.
The trauma. The pain. The shock.
I am in no position to say that Lebanese immigrants weren’t mentally affected and traumatised as well. Because they were, my brother couldn’t eat for days, and he was in Hungary. I’m just here to speak for myself, as a citizen who lives in this country.
The earthquake that preceded the explosion was already too much for my mind to comprehend, and had I not been accompanied by a few supportive friends, I might’ve been running like crazy just at the shake of the ground beneath me, which took only a few seconds. Then came the loudest sound possible, the sound of a thousand bombs combined, every person in the country thought a bombing took place not so far from wherever they were. Yes, I turned pale, and honestly, all I thought of at first was, “Mum!?”. She was the first person I called. Scared. I think that’s a good word to describe her voice with. Shaky works too.
After that, I called the closest people to my heart in Lebanon. All that, before I had even known where the sound came from and what had happened. The sky then slowly turned pink. Pink? We all wondered why that color. And then slowly the news started to surface, “It’s in the center of Beirut”, “Some PM has been targetted”, “It’s Israel”, “Nah, that’s Hezbollah”, yeah we all know the drill. But honestly, given that we are in 2020, all I could think was, “Could you all just f*ck off now!”
Our hearts were pounding, and most of my friends had bad telephone signals. I got a few traumatising voice notes from friends who had just escaped the destruction, others who already suffer from mental illness and couldn’t handle this, and some who just wanted to know I’m alive and OK.
And finally, it started to materialise, it has taken place at the port, it has abolished most of our capital, and especially our favorite zones. But why? How? This was too fast! A whole year’s war couldn’t have done such massive heartless destruction.
Along began the sharing of videos. The way the explosion happened. How could that have been real? That’s a movie. Nothing blows up like that.
Oh, but it does. 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate does the job! It kills over 220 people, injures more than 5,000, and sure does leave hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
But that’s just the start of it. We are all left hollow now. We are all mentally NOT OKAY, just so I don’t use any huge medical terms here. We have been left in the dark with no explanation. Our capital, Beirut, disappeared, and we felt that with all our senses, yet we had no support, not mentally, not physically. We were left alone. All of us! Do we know the truth? Will we ever? No and again no.
Now, how do you expect us to surpass such an incident? How do you think we are treating one another. How short do you think our patience has become, and do you think our memory span even exists now? We have no sense of focus anymore and we are scared as shit at the sight of any new fire, even if the cause of it was some small glass in the forest.
It’s not easy. It’s not easy to sit there after all that and get to listen to everyone else’s version of the story. And let me tell you one thing, each story cuts the wound you thought had healed even deeper. Not one soul in this country has a normal story to tell. Yet, guess what we do? Guess what the Lebanese do. We wake up the next day and we clean, regardless of our anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and exhaustion. We clean, we stand by whoever needed us, we listen to one another, and we repeat that every day.
Sounds tiring enough for you? There’s more. With all that, we all still found ways to be happy. We went out. We still partied. Drank. Danced. And laughed. But we all went home exhausted because we were trying too soon. Because no one really helped! Because we are always left in the dark.
This may have all sounded like some horror movie to many, and it is, especially in 2020, in the year when the entire globe is fighting a pandemic and an economic crisis. In that same year, we, in Lebanon, have an even worse story to tell the world.
