Storm Had Entered the War

Military moved across the city like over a giant chessboard. The deep grumble of rocket prepelled grenades hitting far away, invisible targets kept a constant reminder of the state of affairs. From time to time flares lit up the night.

The grumble had faded for several hours. The city lay calm, calmer than ever imagined. People glued to their television screens had deserted the streets. Suddenly the stilness was shattered to pieces by the powerful roar. This time it was different. The roar was deeper, more powerful and absorbing, yet strangely familiar.

The intensity of the noise increased and the time between its occurences got proogressively shorter. Now, the roars’ hidden arm seemed to hit and smash its mark.

We got up, went into the living room and stared at the sea. A natural spectacle of rage and violence envolded in front of our eyes - a storm had entered the war. Lighting bolts, a thousand times brighter than its human counterparts, exploded through the sky and hit the gloomy surface of the waters. A roar of thunder, concluding the distructive power of its creator, sped through the air.

Rain started to fall. First, it approached in a quiet whisper. Then, it drummed like driving on a throusand galleon slaves, carpet-bombing the ground with its drops. The sound wrapped us in the deepest depts of the night’s cloack. We felt relief. The strom had stepped in to break the spell of war and replace it with an ore of nature’s might.

Repercussions

There seems an absolute order in what follows such an attack of our cozy everydays. A response that seems so natural that it appears to be innate, a biological reaction to the exceptional. An exception however, it isn’t, but this is impossible to admit. Everybody runs to their phones, turns on the TV, as if information from the outside world is the only cure for what is going on inside you. In conjuncture you try to come up with people that might be closest to the blast. You call…the phone is silent. Again and again you try, till the phone relieves your tension with the sound of a free line. In a parallelogram of your outside action, your inside unfolds.

No shock, no panic, just numbness and incomprehension. Pressure is lingering in your chest, fed by disgust and sorrow. A disgust fed by the methods that are adopted to steer our politics, sorrow fed by the fact that this is not a novel occurrence to this part of the world. Your head is struck with emptiness; failing to understand the things your eyes see flickers over the TV screen. As time passes, the sorrow turns into anger. The anger creeps from your chest into you neck and shoulders, your muscles tense and it feels like you carrying the physical weight of the lifeless bodies that are left behind by the attack. Your colleague tells a joke to empty the situation of its graveness. Your mouth forms a smile, its corners fighting the very same weight that weights on your shoulders. Your head gains back its control over the world, just to strike your body with more anger and outrage. And then the ultimate feeling of this part of the world strikes you, IMPOTENCE!!!

10:19 Beirut

.... my building was just shook, by a bomb blast.