I unlock the door. It creaks the sound of wood that hasn't been touched for years. Everything is bathed in black.
I step into our house and smell the air. A distant smell of enclosure and abandonment linger lightly in the air.
And it's so hard to believe.
I look around, scan the rooms, take in the sight of all the furniture and the space we left behind long ago. And they look back with all their stillness. But their gaze holds memories that my mind decodes and starts replaying.
I've always hated my home town. It's a little town where people gossip for entertainment and reject the slightest thing that did not conform to their habits. It's rowdy and I never reached a point where I sympathized with its rowdiness the way I did with Beirut's. Except for the few surviving patches of green in it, I never found beauty in it.
I hated the town but I loved our house. It's a spacious house, with two floors of space, unlike our sardine-like house in the city. But what I loved most about it was the way I had it memorized. The way I knew how the sunlight filters through every room, and when. The way I found my spots around the clock, following the path of the sun across the walls and windows. But the nights were much more quiet. Our house is by the main road of the town, so it was attacked by car pollution around the clock.
At night the traffic lessens and the sounds of the surrounding trees make their way in, the crickets and the frogs, the leaves on windy evenings and the creatures of the night. I used to keep track of the way the moon moved across the sky at night, because every night it would rise a bit later than the previous night. The full moon was the best; from my room's balcony you could see the town and the sea and the hills between. When the electricity was out, the scene was ethereal, like everything was submerged in a pale blue light. And on the days when there was power, you see a thousand little twinkling lights and it all makes you feel like, my God things could possibly be okay. And then there was the brilliant moment when the moon reaches the horizon above the sea and it's too late at night for anyone else but you to notice.
I used to hate the town. I still do. But I liked our house. I was sitting in the tiny room where dad preferred to move to. He built it years ago so he wouldn't have to take all the stairs up to our house. I needed to get something from our house so I came up and that smell hit me. The utterly loaded silence. The silence of the one who waited for years to no avail. I opened my drawers. I found everything in place, I even found clothes I thought I lost a long time ago. Everything was there, the way we left it, just waiting to be used, to come to life again.
It was like it stood there in solemn quietness for years, patiently waiting for us to come back.
