The Realm of the Living

Sunday afternoon I was sitting at the hairdresser indulging in the whims of my, at moments, dramatically superficial life. I was flipping through a people magazine frustrated at the idea that I could have possibly missed an important episode of the Britney Saga.

Suddenly I received a text message that read: “Call me now.”

It was Karen, a friend of mine from New York.
I smiled; surely she had the dirt on Saturday night’s madness in the City: Who was wearing what, who showed up with whom, who went home with whom… I called her eager to quench my vanity with mouthfuls of shallowness.

She picked up the phone and before I had the chance to teasingly greet her, in between strangled words shadowed by cries, she uttered: “Something awful just happened.”

The first thought that raced through my mind, as if I was on autopilot mode was: Damn it, another attack on Beirut, just what we needed before the Harvard Lebanon Trip.
But No. The news was of a different nature. Our best friend Muriel who had left Lebanon a few years back with her family precisely to escape the jeopardy that transpires on every Lebanese household and was now living in Montreal, had just lost her dad of a heart attack.

I sat there numb. Incapable of speaking, incapable of responding, incapable of thinking and I just gazed absent at my silly self in the mirror while a skeletal man in the background was wrestling with my locks in an attempt to flatten not only my rebellious curls but any sense of pride I could have deigned till then to claim.

My phone slithered through my fingers. It hit the floor and the screen fell apart.
I started pondering on the fragility of my own life; how it too would inevitably slither through my fingers, how my own screen, the mask I constantly wear in an attempt to roam flamboyantly through this forged masquerade, will soon enough fall apart.
Ironically, through conflict or passion, through happiness or anguish, one fate is common to the mightiest of leaders as it is to the most frivol of devotees. We are all equally vulnerable in the face of death.

Having witnessed death far too young and far too frequently, I had grown to internalize its horror to the detriment of my sensitivity. I despised myself because I could not bring myself to cry. I hated the cynicism which I learned to cultivate as a defense mechanism for survival. I loathed that I could not speculate on my own expiration date to assess the intensity by which I could allow myself to live: how much time could I waste procrastinating? How many mistakes in finding my professional calling could I afford to make? How often would I be able to gamble with love and lose? When should I initiate my first serious conversation with God…?

And then came the difficult phone call I had been dreading to make.
I dialed on a broken phone with a broken screen only to hear a broken voice that broke my heart and my emotional shield into a thousand pieces.

I mumbled to Muriel that I loved her, that she was not alone to overcome these difficult times, that she made her dad proud and that if she needed somebody to rage at, she could count on me.

But who am I fooling; no words could possibly mend such sorrow because no words can rationalize the obscure mystery that separates us from the dead.

I hung up, got up and paid my hairdresser. I did not go to the Viennese Ball that night. I stayed home in the company of my memories.
Fady, Muriel’s dad, will always be the man who waited countless hours for us to come home safely at 4 in the morning, the man who endured our furies in the midst of our juvenile adolescence crisis with a smile and a joke to make us laugh, the man who was an exemplary husband, who loved his daughters selflessly more than life itself and who treated me as if I was his own …

The hairdresser went home to his wife; Britney Spears is in detox with hopes of getting better. And I maintain the Faith that this life despite all its absurdities and injustices is still a battle worth fighting and a preliminary step to a greater journey that’s bound to commence.