By my bedside was a small and round exposed hole. Without A/C, several hours (at most) of government electricity and the occasional generosity of a longer generator-stretch. The second memory is waking up in the same apartment, drenched in sweat, from the summer heat all of us suffer through annually. I did not feel that pure love and pain combined in one embrace until I held them both, once more, following another car bombing almost 30 years later that took my father. And when she returned home some 30 minutes later with groceries in hand, my mother and I held her the closest I have felt. And the panic-driven screams of searching for loved ones among the victims. Black fumes that tentatively hide the carnage on streets and adjacent sidewalks, littered with shards of blood-stained glass alongside remains of innocent passersby.
The rumble and blast too many of us are familiar with. And within a day or so of arriving, a massive car bomb struck a Syrian army checkpoint near the intersection of Munla and Azme Streets, a block away from my maternal grandparents’ apartment where we were staying. An occupied city (in addition to half the country at that time) under Assad’s rule, with adorning posters of Hafez and Syrian flags on both sides of the border. The first, on a visit to relatives who stayed throughout the civil war, and the culmination of an exhausting trip from the States that included multiple European connections to Damascus, followed by a 10-hour long taxi journey towards the Syrian coast into northern Lebanon.įinal destination: Tripoli. When I think back to my earliest memories of this country, three moments come to mind.