Landmarks
After my partner of four years and I separated, I felt like I had lost all my landmarks. I needed to leave Philadelphia, the city where we shared all our memories. Between storms of tears and with a huge hole in my heart, I packed my bags and decided to go home to Beirut. I came to Lebanon hoping to be surrounded by loved ones and slowly healing under the Mediterranean sun. I knew I would still be grieving, and that my pain would not just disappear. But how could I possibly expect that I would also be mourning the consequences of the third largest explosion in history?
As I waited to board my flight from Istanbul, on the 4th of August, I received the news of the explosion. Anyone who has lived in political unrest knows what comes next. The following hour is blurry. You can no longer feel your legs. You frantically call your loved ones, praying they respond. You search every news outlet, attempting to understand what happened. This time, the impact was so far from the epicenter that every person believed the explosion was in their neighborhood. Nobody knew where the explosion happened or how many explosions there were.
On the 4-hour flight to Beirut, once the adrenaline from the fear and uncertainty had settled, I burst into tears. I had never felt this lost before. I came to Beirut because I needed to be somewhere where everything was familiar and reassuring. Looking around the city that I once knew so well, I quickly realized that I had lost my landmarks in Beirut too. Feeling heartbroken seems irrelevant when people have died under collapsed buildings and thousands have no roof to sleep under. It is difficult to mourn a lost relationship when your city has been destroyed to the ground and your people have lost everything. At times, I felt like my chest was going to collapse inside my body and when I cried, I was no longer sure what I was crying about. My heart aches fed off each other, one making the other more painful, like two small streams coming together to form a stronger channel. These natural confluences are often modeled with mathematical systems and I searched for equations that could heal my pain. To my disappointment, even the most complicated differential equations could never model the complexity and the depth of human grief.
In the days following my breakup, I kept thinking how heartbreak can only be an evolutionary disadvantage, a trait that should have disappeared by natural selection. Since then, I have come to realize the ways in which grieving is necessary. Romantically, without the incentive to heal from my heartbreak, it would be impossible for me to learn to be alone again and get ready to love someone new. Politically, without heartbreak, we would not be able to fight. It is because of our collective sadness that we have the power to ask for a better future and to rise up to the challenge to build Beirut again.
Now, I would be lying if I said that I have completely moved on from my break-up or from the explosion. I haven’t but I have moved forward, and my wounds are starting to look like scars. These past three months have been the most difficult of my life but now that the worst is over, I can look back and realize how strong I have been. I am sure life will continue to throw unexpected challenges my way. I am certain I will feel incredibly lost again. But this most recent chapter has showed me that no matter how disoriented I am, I will find my way.
And I will build new landmarks.