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“AWASSNI, AWASSNI.” The man screamed these words before letting out a guttural cry. Awassni is Arabic for “he shot me.” It had been some years since the war began, and most of us had learned to distinguish sound more keenly. We can tell, from the sound alone, how far the bullets are being fired from, the types of exploding shells and likely shrapnel radius, the type of warplane buzzing above our heads. Depending on the distance of the warplane, we learned to anticipate the time it took for a missile to reach the ground in a fiery explosion. Death, destruction, mayhem, and the screams of people dying and grieving would inevitably follow. This one was close. I looked out the window to see a man dying on the ground. I was too young and scared to walk into the streets to help. Even if I did, more people would be shot and lie dying on the pavement that day and the next.
Lebanon is burning in civil war. But the people have to live, so they walk the streets despite the fact that most roofs have active sniper dens, shelling is indiscriminate and unpredictable, and checkpoints where people who are identified as belonging to a different sect or large group are beheaded on the spot punctuate the streets of every neighborhood, and Israeli warplanes fly over on a daily basis, occasionally firing missiles on us.
The streets are dangerous, and the people are on the verge of collapse. How does a child live in a collapsing world? The Mediterranean Sea is a stone's throw from our house, so I spent much of my time in it dreaming of a better world. Earlier that day, I had gone to the sea to play a game that I often played, particularly when I was sad. I would walk out onto a rocky area on the sea's edge. The rocks were jagged, their crevices full of thorny sea urchins. In various parts of this rocky terrain, holes are formed, presumably from years of erosion. The holes are narrow openings that cleave the rocks. Crashing waves fill the holes before the water retreats, creating a “sharook,