The Dark Shade Of Beirut

Yet Too Much Left Unsaid

“And let me tell you, my dear, you are the last chance I have to survive. And that your love, no matter what, will always be buried deep inside my heart. Let me tell you that you are my home and my safe place, for all the anxiety would vanish in your arms. You are the beam of my soul, my dear. 
I can’t escape your love…I will find myself right in front of you.” 
 

    I put down my pen with a smile and gazed up at her. She was sitting on the chair opposite to me. Her chin was rested beneath her hand and her gorgeous blue eyes were fixed on me. 
    We were at the favorite café, the place we decided to make it ours, for this is the place where our love story was born.  
 
    I reached her hand and gently touched it with my thumb. I made sure her attention was on me when I started reading the small piece I freshly wrote. 

    She blushed when I was done and said “You touched that chamber of my heart where love runs wild”. I laughed and said: “But you melted my heart with this over load cuteness!”. 
 
     Thanks God, in a world full of fake people, finally I find a girl who makes me like a flower which blooms with grace. Mariya is the home I've been looking for long… 
    We stepped out of the café, and started strolling down Beirut streets. We were in heavy clothes as the weather was perfectly cold. Gemmayze had always been crowded, full of love and romance. It was the life of Beirut, but mostly it was the life of love that was growing each day between us. 
 
    Mariya and I talked a lot, as if the evening was never going to end until we were in front of Muhamad Al Amin mosque that was centered in Downtown. But what made us stop and smile is the mosque prayers echoing with the sound of Saint George bells in the church. 
 
    As if the mosque spirit inside me is calling the church spirit inside her. We looked at each others with love and I said “Promise me that just like this mosque and this church are united, we will always be.” She nodded “Just like love birds, if one of them died, the other will no longer have passion to live.”  
 
    I drove her home, then I went to Roueche rocks to have some fresh air. I sat looking at the sea and gazed at that rock that looked like an immovable old Lebanese woman telling the story of Lebanon. 

    I could not take Mariya out of my mind while gazing at that masterpiece. She was just like  this rock, attractive, peaceful, strong and powerful… 
 
 

    A few moments later, a man came and sat on the same seat. He looked at the sea and said: 
- “I escape the world to come here where my soul find peace and calmness by hearing this symphony, the refraction of the waves
with this rock… like a peaceful chaos.” 
 
I replied: 
- “This chaos is necessary to bring order to the ocean's life. Although waves are being crashed sharply by this huge rock, but they are coming again and again. This rock is just settled in peace crashing the waves in
pieces. Life is too fair haha.” 
 
- “Yeah, life is too fair. It is not fair to anybody, not to anything.” 
 
- “Perhaps that's right. We live our life in a weird way, we keep guessing what the life is hiding for us tomorrow instead of living our life each day. It’s stupid.”
 
- “Well said stranger, I'm George by the way.”
 
- “And I'm Murad.. The lost Murad.”
 
     I lightened my cigarette and left my seat. He shouted when I got away from him: “Don’t forget to live the each day of your life lost Murad!!”      I answered silently and smiled: “With Mariya… my life smells like love, nothing else but love”.  

    I went back to my bed, all tired, drowned in my own ocean of deep thinking.

   My mind was still there, with the last night I had with my Mariya. I stopped for a moment and paused my thoughts “My love, Mariya?... but.. she’s not mine..” I whispered  to myself and frowned remembering the painful reality, she is still with her boyfriend. 
 
   Mariya hadn’t spoken a word to her boyfriend about us, and yet she’s still hanging around with me, saying the “I love you too” whenever she hears the “I love you” from me.