It was early summer 2020, somewhere in the thick heat of June. The world was quiet from the pandemic, but my nerves weren’t. I was in the car with my grandfather, Jeddo Georges, windows rolled down, the sun throwing gold on the cracked dashboard. He was smoking, like always. But something about the silence between us that day made me snap. Maybe it was the heaviness in the air, maybe it was the boredom of lockdown, or maybe it was the unspoken dread we all carried after months of masks, curfews, and invisible fear.

“When did you even start smoking?” I asked, half-teasing, half-annoyed.

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even look at me. He just exhaled, long and slow, as if the smoke carried the memory with it.

“Since the attack on Chekka,” he said.

I turned my head slowly, not expecting history to sneak into the passenger seat like that.

“The one in the seventies?” I asked.

He nodded. 

I didn’t ask more. I didn’t need to. I’d grown up in Chekka, a coastal town stained with beauty and sorrow. But until that moment, I had never thought of my grandfather’s cigarette as a relic of war.

A month later, I survived the Beirut Port explosion.

I was working at Annahar newspaper. August 4. You know the date by now. The kind of date that splits time into before and after. The kind of date that doesn’t need to be explained to anyone living here.

I came home covered in blood, not mine. Messy. Dusty. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I was silent, numb. As I stepped out of the car, I saw them, my entire family standing outside, watching me, as if I were a bride returning from her honeymoon. That same collective anticipation. But this time, no music, no ululations. Just wide eyes and quiet breaths. I asked for a cigarette.

In the corner, I saw Jeddo smoking.

And it hit me.

We inherit sorrow here. We inherit war. We inherit the habit of surviving things that should’ve destroyed us. The cigarettes are just markers of all the things we’ve had to swallow.

That’s what it means to be Lebanese.

It means carrying memories you didn’t choose. It means knowing the smell of explosives as well as you know the smell of jasmine. It means bleeding from wounds older than you. It means you grow up learning about every war through someone’s body, a limp, a missing finger, a stare that never really looks straight ahead.

And still, amid all that, we gather. We eat. We argue. We laugh. We survive in a language of rituals.

My grandmother, Nabiha, wraps a scarf around her head every winter and heads to the kitchen like she’s preparing for a sacred ceremony. She picks the kishk that comes straight from our village, powdered yogurt and bulgur dried under the sun. She peels garlic slowly, her fingers moving with a kind of reverence, as if each clove deserves attention. She doesn’t like meat in her kishk, neither do I. Sometimes she’ll add potatoes, soft and golden. She lights the gas burner or the old wood stove (sobiya) and heats up a blackened pan. Blackened by the year, a pan that she refuses to throw. Olive oil goes in first, always. Then the garlic. Then the kishk.

The smell alone is enough to bring you to your knees.

I eat as if I’m tasting the most luxurious meal on Earth. Because I am. It’s not about the ingredients. It’s about what they carry, stories, survival, love wrapped in starch and steam.

That’s just the beginning.

My mother-in-law cooks differently, but with just as much devotion. Her food is simple, mostly vegan, and always seasonal. What she picks from her garden ends up on our plates the same day. Zucchini stews with garlic and tomato paste she makes yearly, green beans simmered in tomato, lentils slow-cooked until soft enough to eat with bread alone. She doesn’t talk much while cooking. Her love is quiet, measured in spoonfuls and portions, not words.

She lets me help sometimes, though I’m slower, clumsier. I mainly steal tastes from pots. And I watch how she moves, like cooking is muscle memory, like feeding others is a language only she knows how to speak fluently. She’ll say “eat”, “you didn’t eat well”, “add more”, “you barely ate, eat some more” and in every sentence, what she really means is “I love you.”

Then there’s my father-in-law, Abu Haitham, a man of the land. You can’t walk with him without stopping every two steps because he’s spotted a wild herb or a sprouting fig. He talks about zaatar like it’s a sacred text. “Smell this,” he says, handing me a leaf. “This is from the upper hills. Stronger.” He plucks mushrooms only he knows how to identify. He tells stories while we walk, about how the apricot tree was stronger twenty years ago, how they used to make vinegar, how the goat you saw being born last week is now ready to walk the trail.

I once watched that goat take its first step outside the barn, hesitant, wobbling, uncertain. We had witnessed its birth a few days before. I remember thinking how fragile everything is here. A single wrong move and that goat could fall, could die. Just like that. But it didn’t. It walked. It learned the path. It followed its mother’s hooves. And I felt a lump in my throat watching something so small, so new, survive in a place like this.

There’s a rhythm here, one made of contradictions. We live in crisis, but move like we have all the time in the world.

We pick olives in the fall. We sit on rooftops when the power’s out. We drink arak under grapevines while the news talks about collapse. We party in abandoned buildings. We light candles for joy, not just for outages. We dance in wedding halls even if the bombs haven’t stopped falling. We scream at each other and then kiss cheeks three times.

We danced and screamed through uprisings, our joy never separated from our rage. Even as we begged for fair wages, water, and light, we still danced.

That’s what it means to be here.

I remember in 2019, during the October Revolution, the sound of people chanting outside my window, the thumping of pots and pans, the slogans, the music. Someone was playing a Fairuz song over a loudspeaker, and it mixed with the chants in a strange harmony. I walked down to the square with my friends. We danced. We yelled. We cried. All in the same hour. In Lebanon, those things aren’t separate; they’re all part of the same emotional current.

We danced like it was our last chance. We danced because we had no answers. We danced because we didn’t know what else to do with our brokenness.

Lebanon is like Sabah, the singer.

Happy. Loud. Glittering. But hiding bruises under sequins.

She once asked for dabke to be danced at her funeral, and it was. People kissed her picture, threw rice, cried, and then danced in circles. Even when she left, she brought joy. Even in death, she insisted on life.

To live here is to memorize her song Shames El Eid,  “Live today, love today, today is in your hands, tomorrow is far.”

This is our anthem. Our curse. Our charm.

We live in a place where tomorrow has never been guaranteed. So we cling to today. And we carry everything, joy, sorrow, rage, humor, in the same breath.

We inherit trauma. 

We inherit stories. We inherit silence. We inherit superstitions and lullabies. We inherit recipes. Land. Ghosts.

We inherit the jasmine.

The way it smells at night, especially in summer, on my grandmother’s balcony. That smell is in my blood. She’d ask me what I wanted for breakfast before I even opened my eyes. Always the same answer: kishk. Garlic. Olive oil. Hot markouk bread. And she’d serve it on a small tray, wrap a shawl around her waist, and tell me about my uncles when they were my age. She’d laugh, then fall quiet. There was always something behind her eyes, like she was seeing a version of the past she couldn’t bring back.

There’s something particular about love in Lebanon. It’s not soft. It’s fierce. It’s built through hardship. You don’t just love your family, you fight with them, for them. You survive with them. You rebuild homes with them after every explosion. You hide tears from them when you’re out of money. You pretend you’re okay so they don’t worry.

And still, every Sunday, you show up with a tray of knafeh.

Even when the currency collapses. Even when banks steal your savings. Even when missiles fall on neighboring towns. You gather. You eat. You laugh. You clean the plates and wash the grief down with coffee.

To be Lebanese is to feel everything. All the time. To be raw. To be awake.

And now, I’m carrying a different kind of inheritance, one I didn’t expect.

The memory of a daughter I never got to raise.

She would’ve learned all this. I would’ve taught her the smell of garlic on kishk. I would’ve taken her to pick wild thyme. I would’ve shown her how to wrap grape leaves. How to love Fairuz. How to dance in the middle of grief. How to laugh with a cracked voice. How to stay, or how to leave.

I would’ve told her: “You belong to a place that breaks and rebuilds every day. And still dares to bloom.”

And maybe that’s the hardest part.

Loving this place means watching it hurt everyone you love. It means planting in cracked soil. It means choosing to hope in a place that punishes hope.

But we do it anyway.

We pass down the stories. The dances. The songs.

Because if we don’t, who will?