Manal and Alaa's bit bucket free speech from the bletches

One of my closest friends, my beloved sister really, Maria left two days ago. Up until a few hours before she was supposed to follow instructions from the British embassy for evacuation, she could not get herself to leave. She has two boys aged nine and five. Maria and her husband lived in London for a long while and earned citizenship there. Everyone who matters in her life called and urged her to evacuate with the Britons. She had moved from Beirut to the mountains on the second day of the siege.

She and I had maintained contact by phone. Maria is so close to my heart, she is part of my bare consciousness of the world around me, one of the foundational elements that make up my world. From the moment this horror had started, our sentences had shortened, the tone of our conversations become contemplative, inconclusive, incapable of circling to some sort of closure. We could not even say "goodbye", invariably we ended conversations with "I will call you back". It felt better to say that, to claim the exchange of information and emotion not yet complete, than the opposite. We called one another to exchange pointless information, "breaking news" that we had heard and had no hope of breaking "fresh" to the other. We repeated headlines to one another and news of other friends: so and so moved to there, so and so left, so and so went nuts... Although absurd, our phone conversations had the rare virtue of being "constitutional", they charged our respective systems and reminded us of the people we once were, the lives we once lived. We asked the same question over and over, "should I leave?", "should you leave?"... She did not want to but felt she ought to for the boys. The eldest of the two was aware of almost everything: Israel, Hezbollah, the "daisy cutters", bunker busters, and kidnapped prisoners. And at age nine he was seized with anxiety and panic at the escalating horror of the military campaign.

She caved in two days ago. I called as she waited on the docks with her two sons. Her husband did not want to leave. "It's awful, it's awfull...", she kept saying. "It's awful, it's awful...", I echoed her. "Have I done the right thing?", she pleaded. "Absolutely," I replied without a hint of hesitation. I could not help telling her that I would miss her. It felt selfish, childishly needy in the way children can be self-centered and dependent. In truth I was terrified of living through this siege without her. I felt like a good part of my heart, at least a good part of what I love about being in Beirut, was standing at the docks waiting with her two sons. We spoke three times. Three times my tears flowed uncontrolably, three times I did not want her to feel anything in my voice, three times I said "I will call you back". I cried like a scared little girl. How am I going to survive without her? How will I make it through without her?

She did not know where she would go after Cyprus. I have not had the courage to call her husband and find out where she is. As I write this, my tears are flowing. Silly, isn't it? I have all the privileges in the world, in Beirut, I have so many safeguards, and yet I draw emotional and mental strength from the friendship of people like Maria and when she is forcibly driven away, my privileges feel futile, useless.

Evacuations are not "assisted departures", they are uprootings, they borne from decisions made under duress that feel nothing like decisions. The extent of the evacuation does not bode well. In fact, standing on the docks watching the American passport holders who were shuttled from the south in busses I got a full sense of what the evacuation means when you're the one staying behind. Whether rational, reasoned or reasonable, or not, there is a faint, inchoate sense of extinction, death, perishing. These people may very well one day remember us, all of us they have seen and witnessed and interacted with before they boarded the ship. I don't know where we will be when they will remember us.