22 – CHAPTER VI: BLISSFUL DENIAL (FINAL CHAPTER)

 

‘Hey you!’ Eva passionately yelled.

‘Why hello,’ I responded, still taken by the revelation that she finally called.

‘God! How I miss your voice!’ she cried.

‘I’d missed you too, darling. How’d you been?’

‘Quite despondent. Life’s rubbish without you.’

‘Am I going to see you anytime soon? I’d slay countries for that.’ I dejectedly said.

‘Baby, I wish I could do whatever thing to make that happen.’

‘We’ll figure something out. I hope.’ I said as I wished her goodnight and scuttled back into my bed.

I woke up the next morning to read a text from her saying her parents agreed on a school trip, and that they’re okay with me going.

I proximately called her, taken by the utter disbelief of what my sight just came up to. Nonetheless, the phone kept on going to voicemail, and I figured it might have been too early. She’d have probably been in one of her classes at the time.

Everything was promptly plotted, and plans of all the things in her mind for our first Valentine’s Day together were soon about to hurdle out and befall.

In the middle of Sally Central Station, she kissed me.

It was a lover’s kiss – brief, soft and affectionate, full of the lingering memories of days spent in blissful denial and a reminder that this would be our last day together until another apt chance came to occurrence. It was as if these few hours together were a window between those two looming spectres, best forgotten until the inevitable passing of time forced us to face them head on.

For the next twelve hours, we would be lovers, just an ordinary couple, like any other.

It seemed fitting to spend a few of our last minutes together in Sally Central, one of my favourite spots in the city. It’s a place where the past and the future meet, where all the disparate fragments of Beirut mingle – the wealthy, the poor, the punks and the Hamra Street girls and boys, tourists and commuters – each passing on their way to separate lives, united only by a hurried few moments of scurrying, all briefly sharing the same experience, racing for a bus.

After the kiss, I looked up and around, as I always did when I was standing there. I liked to gaze up at the marble pillars and vaulted arches holding an upside-down Mediterranean sky, the zodiac view that ancient cartographers imagined angels or alien life forms might have when looking down on the Earth from the heavens.

Sally Central Station summed up all the things I liked about Beirut: it was full of promise and alive with the energy of people rushing to and fro, a veritable melting pot of bodies in motion; the opulence and grandeur of the gold chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were a promise to everyone who passed through with nothing but a dime in their pocket that somewhere overhead, opportunity waited.

Good things happen in Beirut; that was the message of Sally Central Station. If you worked hard enough, if you threw your dream in the ring, then one day you’d get lucky and the city would throw a chance right back at you.

I took her hand and pulled her along through the crowd to the ramp leading down to the gallery at the lower level.

I stood her in the corner, facing one of the pillars that joined the low arches and then ran to the other side.

‘Eva,’ I said, my soft voice coming through the pillar as clear as a bell, as if the wall were talking to her. She knew it was an architectural phenomenon – sound waves apparently travelling from one pillar to its opposite across the domed ceiling, nothing more than a bit of acoustic magic – but it was eerie nonetheless. I was a dozen feet away, with my back to her, yet could have been whispering straight into her ear.

‘Yes?’ she murmured to the wall.

‘Life makes sense when you’re around.’

She laughed and turned to look at me.

I walked back and took her hand again, pulling her into another embrace. My torso was pleasantly firm, and I was nearly a foot taller than her, so even in heels she could rest her head on my shoulder.

We had our way to the bus, and for my surprise, it wasn’t a school trip after all; just a bunch of her mates pulling out a ride to Mount Barouk, renowned of its snow at this time of the year. I felt a rush of relief travel athwart my skin, for it meant there would be no administrative supervision.

The first stop was at a local restaurant.

Eva refused to come down.

‘I don’t know… I’m quite a bit giddy. I’d rather keep my fast.’ She censoriously said.

‘You’ll have the entire day long to grumble. But for now,’ I whispered, into her ear this time, ‘let’s eat.’

It was a popular place and I was surprised that they’d been able to get a reservation at this late notice, though knowing Eva, she’d probably booked and her friends in advance and never mentioned the fact to me. We still had to wait for twenty minutes to be seated, but the waiter brought the menus immediately and waited to take our drinks order.

‘Coke?’ I asked, ordering an espresso for myself.

‘Fresh orange juice for me, please,’ she said to the waiter, watching a hint of a smile pass across my lips as she ignored my suggestion.

The menu is rather overwhelming here,’ I said. ‘Shall we share some Hummus to start?’

She nodded.

The waiter disappeared to the kitchen, and I stretched my arm across the table and laid my hand over hers. Her touch was colder than I expected, considering the heat of her body, and I shivered involuntarily in surprise. She’d been holding her glass with that hand, I realised, and it must be cold, though she always ordered her drinks easy on the ice.

‘Do you miss it? Dubai?’

‘Yes. Not all the time, but when something reminds me of our old house there, a word or a smell or a sight of something, then I do. Not my friends or my father so much, because I talk to them on the phone and by email, but I miss the land, the ocean.’

‘It’s like reading a book, watching your face. You give away more than you think. It doesn’t all come out in your art, you know.’

Everyone was almost done with their breakfast, and we were soon to set off on the road again.

‘We’re sitting in the back,’ Eva whispered into my ear, thanking the staff on our way out.

They responded with a warm smile. Eva was a generous tipper. I had read somewhere that you should always pay attention to the way a woman treats animals, her mother and waiters, so I filed this bit of information away in her running positive column.

We were there in no time.

There it rested. Sheltering the summits of a chain of betrothed mountains with a silvery grey sheath, the snow mirrored the shimmering glimmer of the golden sunbeams respiting on its pallor.

I took her hand and snitched behind everybody’s backs.

We hiked up a tiny hill and seated each other on a rock-like nugget, the intact region beneath us.

No one could have possibly caught a glimpse of us assembled up there, but we were aware of everyone underneath our sight.

People looked like petite grinded chocolate chips bathing in a pool of white cream.

Stray sounds of children in the bottom reached us, amplified, deafening in their quietness.

‘Isn’t this beautiful?’ she said, glancing at the sun.

I smiled at her.

Her light brown hair unfurled all the way across her shoulders. She stretched, sat up for a moment and in one swift movement pulled off her tight print jacket.

I couldn’t help but admire the curvature of her back as she arose of her pew. The mountains of her ass were like a geometric symphony delineating a perfect curve with mathematical precision.

Shadows had begun to fall across us, and the remaining light barely illuminated her face in the hand-mirror as she attempted at fixing her light make-up.

The garment she wore bit into her skin with all the hard comfort of a steel embrace.

Reflections of a magical escape were already hasting across Eva’s head. She dreamed of an enchanted mystery tour. A journey far away in which we were its sole characters. She wanted me to grab her hand and run missing. Shade away into a secret place of our own. Never to come back.

She was suddenly awakened of her fantasy with the heat of my lips across hers.

Her arms were then reluctantly gripping me.

Classical. An impressionistic cascade of soft, delicate feelings that reminded us of the sea, and the shimmering surface of the troubled waters. We stood at that intersection while the rest of the world rushed past, and I imagined that if the moment was caught on film, the picture would be of just us, our bodies delineated in a whirl of colour, as we were the only two people existed, whole, while the rest of the population was indistinct, people blending together in a blur, each individual as featureless as the next. We had always seemed fond of each other; everyone thought we were the paragons of romanticism, proof that two people could stay together through thick and thin. When we looked out and saw what we imagined was the world in front of us, we’d felt for few moments that we were free of the shadows and saw everything outside borders.

We had hit the highway back in a flash, and everyone on the bus was peevishly enduring the aftermath of the lengthy running and snow play.

Plans were set to finally stopover a pub on the way back, but Eva and I were by now too fatigued for the mingling or even the toleration of any human interaction.

We nipped out of the bus and wandered across the fronting street, while the rest had themselves comfy inside.

She took my hand and we meandered together with the hushed sea.

I held her still to my chest, and I could feel the tears trip down her cheeks as she was copiously realising this would sooner be goodbye, yet for an unsettled period this time.

Right there, overhead the ornamental portions of the cemented pavement, we grasped into a twenty minutes embrace.

The heat visibly rose to Eva’s cheeks as words tried to pass her lips but were unable to do so; a rushing herd of emotions clearly bubbled inside her.

Strange how memory could imperceptibly shift at random through the spectrum of a rainbow, and a curious filter of emotion. Staring at the moon shimmering over the night sea on our left, it felt a bit like dreams that pierce the wall of your sleep, and that you feel you should write down as you know they will be gone in the morning, and you will not remember them again. I knew that if I were to die at that moment, the memories of her would stay with me until the very last moment, playing like a loop of film on the screen of my mind. The best way to go, I felt, with her on my mind, would have been with the image of her feeble smile in my eyes, there for eternity. As she moved closer to me, her eyes hesitant, both unsure what to say or do next, it was as if we were both being moved by a power we had no control over. Like magnets coming together. As a wave of emotion swept over me, I stood still. Overcome by a complex of maelstrom of feelings. Startled by her offering. Her greeting. I was aware that every cell in her body was screaming for her to throw herself in between my arms. I could feel the heat radiating from her. Being sure if that underground river on which our lives floated had not existed and carried us with its flow, we would have probably not even met, it was as if the months had melted away. The rest of the world faded. There was an inevitability about it all. It was at times like this I felt bereft and words were just not enough to express the turmoil raging inside me, and realised she wanted me to tattoo her heart with indelible ink, make me hers and banish for the emptiness inside that plagues her.

I was beginning to be aware of the mere point that this might be it.

The twenty-two months of a heavenly affiliation were about to come to a sudden halt.

I felt that by the moment I let go off her, she might not be able to come back again. I had sundry feelings that she was wishing to have told me something, yet rendered powerless.

‘You’re not coming back, are you?’ I hummed with a quivering voice as a chute of tears fetched its trail down my cheeks.

She couldn’t mutter a single word, exploding into a stream of weeping.

‘Are you, Eva,’ I outrageously shrieked, ‘are you?!’

‘They’re taking me back to the Emirates,’ she barely voiced through her lamentation, ‘that’s why they allowed us today.’

I squeezed her even snugger.

‘But… You’ll still come back, right?’

‘I don’t know. I want to be with you.’ She cried.

 

Eight months went by.

Life went on, as it always does.

Months went by in a flash, time swept away in the peaceful flow of life with myself.

I once heard a wise man say, ‘It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and preserving courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.’

Of course, she will still be on my mind, and not a day would go by without painful memories as well as joyful ones piercing the mask of her enforced emotional silence. I still visit our little hill, and as I tread the damp grass of the heath, I can’t help recalling the sight of Eva making her way across it towards the bench where she had been mine privately for the last time. I can’t help remembering her joyful smile seeding life in the depths of anything it laid its rays upon. It now feels like a lifetime ago. I know it was inevitable and there was no point in fighting it. I just had to accept these bittersweet feelings and survive them as best I could. Maybe time would bring a measure of solace, but I’m not betting on it.