“You Who Are Heading to Nabatieh……”

Here, I tell myself that I survived. Yet the moment I play this clip from an Ahmed Kaabour song, the fortresses I built for safety collapse, and every attempt at survival turns out to be nothing but a lie.

This is the first time a war has erupted while I am far away. Fear gnaws at me. The thought of losing loved ones consumes me, or of what they will lose in this new war, and what they will endure as they once again surrender to anxiety devouring their nerves and hearts, to insomnia chasing sleep from their eyes, to danger snatching away their fragile sense of safety. I ask myself: did I really survive? Can the body survive while the soul remains captive?

Since arriving in this distant country, I decided to neglect the details of my previous life and begin accumulating new, neutral ones. I wanted to build a reassuring memory, starting by forgetting the last war and the wars before it.

So I rearranged my emotions, my relationships, and my time. I fought longing with songs, killed boredom with reading, and managed to shed the weight of the past. I began painting my present with a clean brush, erasing every intrusive line from my canvas. I designed another sketch for my future, resetting the counter of sacrifices. I told myself: I will give to myself and take from it what astonishes me, not what astonishes the world.

When the month of Ramadan arrived, I prepared to live a spiritual experience. During the day I practiced meditation, and in the evening I prepared a modest iftar that resembled the sustenance of ascetics.

But the new war shattered my plan. It turned my inner peace into pathological anxiety, my calm into endless battles I fight day and night with my tears and my longing.

Since it began, I have done little except follow live broadcasts across different channels. My eyes move between scenes the way pain moves through an injured body. After every strike on a place I know, I call down a long list of names.

The scenes of Gaza’s annihilation never leave my mind as I count the massacres moving from one place to another. My God, will Israel repeat the same here? What could stop it? The free world? Democratic values? Humanitarian law?

Images from Nabatieh keep coming. Faces I know are now counted among the dead. Houses too. Life there has lost its meaning. Part of the memory disappeared in the previous war; the planes are now destroying what remains.

I wonder: if I return, will I find it as I left it? Even though I had already left it sad and devastated, after it had lost its dearest people, its market, and its beautiful homes. Will returning become impossible? Will it turn into occupied land, or a scorched one? Have I lost it forever? Was the day I left the last day of our sweet companionship?

My phone rings. It’s Darine. She tells me she has returned home. She doesn’t say why. I almost lose my mind. I beg her to reconsider. I hang up and collapse in tears. My God, what would make a family return to hell? I know the answer, and I refuse to admit it. She knows it too. I cannot sleep.

All of this while I am in a safe place. What remains of safety when everyone I know is in danger? I hang my false sense of security on the ropes of guilt. I drive it away as if it were an unwelcome guest, and I call on anxiety, preparing the ground for it to rest.

On one of the days when Nabatieh was under bombardment, I asked my neighbor, Um Sami, how many times she had left the town. She answered: “Only once, for the pilgrimage to Mecca. In all the wars that passed, I stayed here, from the first shell that fell on the market in the early seventies until the July War. I cannot live outside Nabatieh, nor outside my home.”

Um Sami died before seeing her house turned into a deep crater, like an open grave. Israeli missiles destroyed it on the night of the ceasefire, grinding its stones to dust, along with her voice that used to comfort my worries, and the image of her chasing after me with a cup of coffee before I rushed off to work.

Without realizing it, Um Sami was a front line of steadfastness all by herself. The decision to remain on the land, what modern political language calls “resistance,” was at its core an act of her emotional heart. In every wave of displacement, she would tell me: “I don’t have the heart to leave Nabatieh alone.”

Displacement is a fear that lives in the consciousness of people in the south, ever since they witnessed the catastrophe of their Palestinian brothers, who were left with nothing from their homes except their keys.

Before I left, I repaired what was necessary in my house and left a copy of its keys with my neighbor for safekeeping. I told her: “Don’t leave it alone.”

I now think of my neighbors. Where might they have fled with their families? I think of their modest, poor houses. Did they take the keys with them? Will the houses still be standing, waiting for them? The homes of Ibtissam, Taghreed, Sana, Safaa, and Ghada have already fallen.

I recall scenes dear to my heart: Abu Adham’s house with its stone walls and green garden all year round; Kamila washing her house every morning, unfazed by winter’s cold or summer’s heat; coffee cups resting on the edges of trays in the homes of the Saray neighborhood; and the “sukkarjiyyeh” escaping their houses on hot summer nights, climbing to the top of “Hill Zero Three,” singing until morning: “Did the Party see the drunkards?”

I try to reclaim the joy I felt when I returned to Nabatieh before the previous war. How hard I struggled to recover a precious life I had lost, to mend what had broken between us in affection and belonging. With the eyes of someone astonished, I watched jasmine stretch over the entrances of houses, the bitter orange blossoms forming, grape clusters growing, and walnuts ripening in the orchards. Every day I went out to check on its alleys and stroll through its market. I discovered it was not so much a city as it was a living being, pulsing with life, telling my heart: get up so I can sit in your place.

I remember when my granddaughter took her first steps and said her first words. I took her to the stairs of the Saray neighborhood near Taha’s shop. We climbed and descended them again and again while counting: “one, two, thirty…” Thirty steps that Israel destroyed in the previous war in less than thirty seconds.

I remember when my son grew up and the “Rabita” took him to the mosque in the Saray neighborhood. Someone told me, and I rushed after him, imagining the catastrophe before my eyes: his picture against a yellow background, the title of “martyr” before his name. I lost my mind. I waited for the Rabita at the mosque’s door, and when he came out I bombarded him with reproach and threats while he stood there, head lowered, apologizing.

At that time, Nabatieh had not yet surrendered to this ideological tide. It still left wide spaces for dissent and difference of opinion. It still clung to its uniqueness, its distinction from the wider environment around it.

It was a vibrant society with an open character in the midst of a conservative rural surrounding. It leaned on an enlightened cultural, scientific, and religious memory that early on had taken it beyond narrow thinking, beyond drawn borders and closed doors, until it became more of an identity than a city.

The pillars of that identity were a mixture of contradictions that only Nabatieh could hold together: the Amiliya Hussainiya that kept its distance from politics and its symbols and remained resistant to ideological framing; the market that resembled a parliament where all sects and regions were represented; its schools that allowed families to choose what suited their orientations; its cultural clubs, secular, leftist, religious, and women’s groups; and its Ashura with its rebellious popular imprint that defied ideology.

Cities, like us humans, pass through youth, when they are beautiful and radiant. Then the marks of old age creep in and they lose their brilliance and charm. That is what happened to Nabatieh. Hardline political discourse, sectarian fanaticism, and closed-minded thinking distorted the beauty of its spirit.

Over the past thirty years, I have witnessed its transformations. I followed them with concern and protested them. It never once took away my right to object. But when its features began to wrinkle further, dissent became betrayal. My closest friends drifted away. They raised a towering wall of hostility between us. Even the intellectuals among them declared their loyalty to the herd.

And yet it never made me feel like a stranger. When we returned after the ceasefire, we spoke only the language of love. We wiped each other’s wounds, worked together to clear the rubble and the pain, and made sure to sit together for long hours. We would meet and say goodbye at the same moment, as if it were the last time.

Stay well, my beautiful one. With your people. With your houses whose love overwhelmed us. With your streets and alleys that know our voices and remember the warmth of our footsteps. With your hills that touch the sky. With your modest minarets and your single church.

Here I am, realizing that I have not survived loving you.

“You who are heading toward the Litani, please send my greetings and say good morning to the people of Nabatieh…”