At 11:30last night, I was woken from my sleep by the now-familiar sound of machine gun fire. In the 5 days since the last bout of shooting, I had forgotten how very, very frightening those sounds are. I jumped out of bed and went into the living room to see if my SO (significant other: term borrowed from the legendary Will Self) was still watching tv. The tv was on, but he was on the balcony listening to the shots. My immediate reaction was to tell him to come inside, to close the shutters and to sit on the ground lest any stray bullets pierce our humble threshold.
The shooting was audibly far away, somewhere down to the left (south west), probably in Ras al Nab’a, and the instinctive, fear-driven impulse to run and hide is conquered by a rational calculation that bullets don’t travel kilometres. But then it started on the right, sounding like it was coming from downtown. “Maybe they’re storming Parliament”, the SO offered. The suddenly, shots rang out much closer, too close for comfort, and we quickly retired behind our minimal barricade, knowing full well that neither wood nor glass stops those deadly shards of metal.
The shooting went on for over an hour, but somehow in the midst of it, I managed to fall asleep again.
This morning I awoke and, once the electricity had resumed from our daily three hour-long power cuts, eagerly flicked on the tv for information about last night’s events. It is weird, because despite my disdain for the mainstream media, I nevertheless compulsively turn to it for some sort of confirmation of what I have witnessed, as if the orderly format of a news bulletin could validate being consumed with an a-rational fear.
But nothing: BBC was screening glory shots of Justine Henin; CNN was debating about the alleged UFO’s in the MOD’s newly released files. Al Jazeera was talking about Palestinian cinema, Al Arabiyya about unemployment demonstrations in Morocco, while local rival Lebanese channels LBC and NBN were showing Lebanese Star Academy and a documentary on the lives of Amazonian Indians respectively.
Great, just the sorts of information that is really useful to me right now in understanding what the hell is going on in this (non-metaphorically) bloody country.
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2 comments:
Yo...those shots were fired in celebration of the government taking back its decisions to remove Wafic Shukair from his post at Beirut Airport and to dismantle Hizbullah's communications network. So no worries!
Didi x
yeah, i wrote the post at 8:30 am with no internet, and by the time i got online and after i posted it, i read that that was the cause
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