I deeply regret not leaving sooner. I envy the Lebanese who emigrated before me and built lives far from this hell. They may say they never found paradise, but I envy them for something else: memories with no corner reserved for war.

Sometimes I think they are missing a fundamental part of Lebanon’s strange and singular identity. How can you be Lebanese and have a memory untouched by the sounds and images of war? Many of them have never heard the buzz of drones, the roar of fighter jets, or even the crack of a gunshot. They have never seen a soldier, a checkpoint, or any kind of weapon.

From the exile I chose of my own free will, I follow the lives of those Lebanese who chose to stay, or perhaps of those whom the homeland chose while casting others out. I try to unravel the bond of love between two fragile sides, both on the brink of collapse, breaking it into smaller pieces in the hope of understanding it. In the end, I find that its secret lies in patience.

Sometimes, patience in love matters more than love itself. As Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, “The road home is more beautiful than home itself.” Love remains fragile unless it is sustained by patience and endurance. Like any great structure, it will collapse if it is built on nothing but imagination.

Yet I still cannot explain the kind of love that binds people to a place so deeply that they cannot bring themselves to leave it.

Salam used to say, throughout our years of friendship, that she needed Nabatieh the way a fish needs water. If she ever left it, she would die. That feeling went beyond love or attachment. It was something almost spiritual.

I, on the other hand, was her complete opposite. My caravan was always ready to move, my tent always searching for a new home, and the nomad’s unease with settling down only grew stronger inside me.

Then, “the wind rose, and everything that had been lost in the world, in life, and in those we loved came to an end.” We both became fish out of water.

When I was a child, I once asked my grandmother why she loved Beirut more than our village.

She looked at me, surprised. “Who told you that?” she asked.

I told her I was always hearing her talk about Beirut with the women next door, and I could see her eyes light up whenever she did. I had come to believe that whoever had seen Beirut had, in a way, seen the whole world.

I ask myself now, did I really have to go this far away to discover that the whole world had been in my hands all along? To realize that I love Beirut more than the whole world?

I have been in Canada for more than a year now, surrounded by an abundance of safety, calm, peace, time, order, care, and stability. What more could I ask for? There are many other comforts I have come to enjoy here, yet I do not feel alive.

So, is life something other than all these things? It is, for those who have known nothing else. But not for someone who grew up with a warm city on the Mediterranean.

At the supermarket, a man noticed me buying a bunch of fresh za’atar and asked what it was. I explained at length. He realized I was from the Middle East and asked where exactly. I told him Lebanon. He did not recognize it, so I said Beirut. He smiled and said, “Oh… wow. Beirut, yes, I know it. It’s a warm city on the Mediterranean.”

For a Canadian, the fact that a country is warm is reason enough to find it beautiful, to want to stay there and never leave. We carried on with our shopping after our brief conversation about warmth, while I found myself wondering what had brought me to this cold country in the first place.

I go back over the reasons, and there are more than I can count on both hands. Then I place a reassuring hand on my heart and tell it that it made the right decision, and still has.

Life is never the same from one place to another. It is another version of the fish story, except this time it is about a fish born in an aquarium, convinced that the aquarium was the sea. Then another fish arrived and told it about the ocean, shattering the comfort of its settled existence. Comfort? No, an illusion.

Exile is a whale, like the one that swallowed Jonah. But you do not emerge from its belly alive, let alone as a prophet.

I read Mohammad’s message over and over again. He says he has nothing left to do in this country except wait for death. Once again, I place a hand on my heart and weep. How much courage does it take to keep living while waiting for death? I tell him that I, too, am waiting for death. Life has stretched on for so long that it has lost its taste, its color, and its scent.

Lara came to visit me last month, and “in five minutes we spoke of five months,” as Feiruz sings.

We sat facing each other for hours, like two mountains built from layers of disappointment. We cried and laughed, not out of sorrow or joy, not out of hope or pain. That is precisely the feeling that takes root in exile: ash.

Everything becomes made of its opposite, action and stillness, black and white at once. In other words, it is devoid of life.

I sometimes think exile comes with a single emotional map, handed to each of us the moment we cross its threshold. We read it, memorize it, and slowly become strange creatures, part human, part machine.

We weep from loneliness, yet sound the alarm whenever someone gets too close. We complain of isolation, then switch on the red light to keep anyone from crossing its boundary. We reach out to strangers, but our batteries hold only so much charge.

“How do you kill time?” my mother asks.

At least two hours a day are devoted to long phone conversations with her and with my friends. Sometimes I replace the calls with voice messages, trying to make them sound as cheerful as possible.

With Mona Lisa, my granddaughter, I turn on the camera. She chatters away until sleep slowly overtakes her and she drifts off, leaving me alone for the beast of emptiness to swallow, while longing tears a wide hole through my heart.

At the end of each day, I never forget to thank the developed West, which has driven us apart physically while bringing our scattered lives back together virtually, for the blessing of WhatsApp.

In the morning, I escape into the forest, trying to make the surrounding landscape feel a little more Lebanese. I cross the river from one bank to the other, repeating out loud, “South of the river. North of the river.” I call the birds by the names we use back home: the robin, the hoopoe, the swallow, and the heron. “I am sad too, Heron,” I whisper, “but no one knows me by that name.”

In the evening, I wander through the neighborhood, hoping to catch sight of a stray cat or dog, clothes swaying on a washing line, or a woman pouring water over her balcony railing. I sit on a bench in the park, “waiting for a hand to greet me, for a voice to say, ‘Good evening.'”

I think of my grandmother, who carried a little Phoenician inside her. Every time she returned from the Hajj, the Umrah, or a pilgrimage to the shrines of the Imams, she came back convinced that Lebanon was unlike any other country in the world: Its beautiful weather, its green landscapes, its delicious food, its wonderful people.

Then I revisit all the reasons that drove me to leave and find tany. I quiet the restless voice inside me. But then another question arises: why did I never try, not even once, to count the reasons that might have made me stay?

My God… perhaps there are many of those too.

Tonight, before I go to sleep, I will.