Wednesday, September 08, 2004

I am back

I am physically back. But my feelings are a blur and a part of me is still roaming the lit up midnight alleys of downtown Beirut. People with people watching people. Eating, drinking, laughing, dancing. Pulsating with a strange and infinite energy for living. Like all of existence was but a smoke-choked flesh-packed red-shaded quaking underground club of formidable sin that never tires and never sleeps. Part of me is still there, painted on the walls and the sidewalks like some ugly graffiti, stinking the fumes of other people's cigarettes, exhaling the vapors of other people's liquor, drenched in sweat and nectar, fallen and drowned in the vortex of a deeply perturbed consciousness, yet a consciousness that has come closer to its origins than it ever has or ever will again..
I am back, but the midnight alleys of downtown Beirut and its sinful children are still pasted on my clothes and on my skin. As I am pasted on theirs.
And the clean and empty streets of this city need nothing from me. Have nothing of me. And nothing for me. I walk them like a prisoner walks the hallway between the cell and a visiting room where he knows no one is waiting.
Yes I am back, and I am here, but I know not if I ever was here. And if I was, or thought I was, I know now that I never will be back again.

2 Comments:

Blogger euphorialapse said...

The city you long for is just another arid city now .Your tracks are not covered yet.You walk now on the pavements of a far-flung region of the world wherein memories mix up with imaginings.Why the ambivalence? Why the longing?Are you an alien or a predator?What's the relevance of your body in a virtual reality?

12:55 AM  
Blogger Fouad said...

Why the ambivalence? I wish I knew.. I guess some things are just inevitable. How can I not be ambivalent when my life does not seem to belong to me, when my happiness is many places but where I am, when nothing I truly believe in, seems to be worth believing in anymore... I have become an alien everywhere. And the city I long for, will only be another exile. It is quite sad that home is everywhere but where you are. It is even sadder when home is not even who you are. When all is far, and all is empty, I set sail and dock on a familiar shore, somewhere in my imagination.

4:30 PM  

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