A Letter to Beirut

Beirut,       
           I write to you from my third home in this lifetime. It has been three years, six months, and two days since I’ve last seen you. My friends ask me how you’ve been since the blast. I tell them you are still mourning, but healing. My Lebanese friends abroad ask me how I’ve gone so long without seeing you. I tell them, maybe next summer. Yes, next summer, when the inflation goes down and along with it, the people in charge.
 
           I feel guilty, Beirut. I can only write poetry to share with consumers who have merely heard about you through the mouths of people who haven’t experienced you. I want to write to you in my mother language but my tongue does not accent the words correctly anymore and I fear I might insult you instead of compliment you.
 
           I want to reach at your night’s sky and grab all the wishes I threw at you in high school. A lot came true, Beirut. And I know I wanted to leave so bad back then, but I miss you. I miss the Imam’s voice on a Friday and the church bells on a Sunday. I miss being asked, who’s your father, habibti? I miss saying yo-uborni without having to explain how it means I love you so much I would die before you just so I don’t experience life without you. I want the cards and hookah gatherings, the I have to go back early because my mom said so outings, the closed roads in protest because we were born patriotic, the boujie lifestyle, the endless cousins… I want it all.
 
           I write to you through the wishful thinking of twenty-two-year-old starting her life in corporate. The years will pass by far too quick for you and me to comprehend. One day, I will tell my children of you— the greatest heartache of my lifetime. I will tell them of your valiant battles- how you stood courageously in the face of injustice and said no. I will tell them of the nights I spent studying to the light of a candle and still got good grades. I will tell them of herbs and spices their tongues could only dream of. I will teach them your language, your curse words, and your ever so soft expressions, so that one day, they will walk your streets and think, this is what made my mother strong, this is what made my mother’s heart. You are my heart, Beirut. I reconcile you into my heart, but I cannot come back.
 
With love,
One of fourteen million Lebanese diaspora