1207 PM
I was dreading this moment for the past year.
Waking up in the morning, brushing my teeth, dressing up, and then waiting for the clock to hit 1207 PM, EST. At that precise moment, it would have been a year, 365 days since the Beirut Explosion.
I was dreading opening social media and seeing the indifference. I was dreading the nightmares and the heaviness in my soul. Isn’t it weird to still feel those emotions when you weren’t there when it happened? When you weren’t even born in this country? An overwhelming confusion of feelings.
For the past year, I’ve been navigating a mixture of sadness, anger, heartbreak, and mostly guilt. The guilt is strong. For the past year, I’ve been waking up at night wishing I wasn’t this lucky, dreaming of going there and alleviating the pain of my brothers and sisters. For the past year, I’ve been trying to go forward without thinking about this event and I’ve been hating myself.
I write a lot about my identity and how I struggle with it. How I define it and how I embrace it. On August 4, 2020, it came back to me. I explained it, wrote about it, and got applause for my piece about it. But then, the guilt settled in.
Being the daughter of Lebanese immigrants and a part of the Lebanese diaspora is one of these things that are hard to grasp. I wasn’t born in Lebanon. I went there once. I am privileged. I live in a country that is financially stable and where corruption isn’t super rampant. When I vote, there’s actually something happening. When I get mad, I can say it without being afraid of getting hurt the next day.
I’ve never lived in Lebanon. I went once when I was 6 years old. I have Lebanese citizenship, but it doesn’t serve me much. You could ask me about Lebanese politics and I wouldn’t know how to answer. My family has been here for 32 years now. We are older immigrants. I meet Lebanese people who just immigrated here and tell them I’m born here and they look at me like I’m some sort of other species. They’ve heard about us, the Westernized Lebanese, the ones that share the blood but nothing else.
But then, when I think about August 4, 2020, I remember the dread. The darkness that loomed over me. The days spent crying, not knowing why I reacted this bad and yet knowing. Knowing that my Jedo was buried there, that my Tita, aunt, and uncle were there, that part of me is from there. I spent days crying, trying to make sense of this all, and feeling the guilt. The constant guilt of having it easy, here.
The explosion, even if it happened in Lebanon, I felt it in my body. I feel it to this day. I feel the bruises in my soul, the pain of not being there to support the others, and mostly, the pain of living here while looking exactly like my sisters and brothers there.
For a year now, I’ve never moved from August 4, 2020, at 1207 PM. For a year now, I’ve been living this moment again and again. I receive a notification on my iPhone telling me about an explosion in Beirut. I call my mom asking her if everyone’s alright. Her voice is shaking, but she says yes. I barely have time to talk with her because I have to get into a meeting. The rain is pouring outside, I have to take a brave face, do as nothing happened, and become a Western person again. As I laugh, make jokes and finally shake hands, I go back out. Rain is pouring even harder and at that point, I just walk. I walk for so long, I don’t even remember how I get home and when I get home... I collapse.
I don’t think I ever got back up. I turn around at night and I dream about the explosion. I remember the pain and the disappointment. People around me didn’t care, people around me didn’t give a fuck. Hurt by the indifference, I got closer to Lebanese friends that were like me. They could understand my pain and anger.
To this day, indifference hurts. Last month, in class, a teacher showed without any warning a harrowing picture of the Lebanese explosion. A man holding his badly injured daughter in his arms. I couldn’t look at it, I squirmed, living again the explosion in my body. The teacher continued explaining the technicalities of the picture, the framing without explaining the context behind it. The indifference made me mad. I turned off my camera and took a break. I cried while the other students were looking at a picture that didn’t mean a thing to them.
For me, it meant the end of my world as I knew it. It meant understanding that I didn’t belong or maybe I belonged more than what I thought. It meant the guilt, the guilt of living here and not being there with my people. It meant the destruction of my parents’ neighborhood, the destruction of my mother’s family house, where she grew up.
For a year now, I’ve been feeling guilty. I dream about an event that I didn’t even witness. I carry pain and anger with me. For a year now, it’s been August 4, 2020, at 1207 PM, EST. Time stands still and me with it.