"The day their love died, so did an unsuspecting duck..."

 A piece for Annahar English on the August 4 blast in Beirut - published September 2020

It’s been over a month, and the blast has sunk into our skin, permeated our pores, crawled into the corner, an uninvited guest we mindlessly feed our stale grief.

It is a multi-layered thing: the cataclysmic explosion, its searing aftermath, muscle memory triggered by the pop of a balloon at a birthday gathering that was meant to evoke some semblance of normalcy. It is an efficient executioner: three or four cozily co-habiting generations felled under each roof, family histories and homes telescoping and collapsing into the dirt.

It is the residue of thousands of hearts splintered, hundreds of bones broken, dust we still find in dark corners of rooms we thought the reverberations hadn’t reached. Fine, powdery glass glinting on the sidewalk, ground into the asphalt by people desperate to keep up the pretense of going about their lives. It is the indignity of trees that have bowed down, violently shedding their leaves, disowning summer.

It is the dichotomy, the duality, the unholy mirroring of teenagers dug up from  beneath rubble their classmates scoop up with shiny new shovels. Of wounded doctors treating the wounded masses. Of teary-eyed residents telling their stories to teary-eyed journalists. Of people trying to start new lives amidst death, babies born under scattered debris, wedding dresses fluttering like white flags of submission. It is volunteers surging through blood-spattered neighborhoods like blood re-oxygenating  atrophied limbs.

It is the atrocity, the avoidability of it all, the apathy that rings louder in its murderous indifference than the explosion that decimated half a city. It is the altruism of strangers, the heroism of neighbors lifting each other up onto broken backs and shoulders when they have been so brutally let down.

It resonates, the relentless echo of horrors counted and recounted in infinite patterns, yet everyone looks the same in their grief, their rage, their helplessness,   their stoicism. It revisits, a shadow across each sunset, a breath involuntarily caught  at 6:08 every evening.

It is one heart, one month on, still beating, faintly flickering under the wreckage, a testament to a collective spirit that will not be broken.