the detour

Last night, I witnessed something beautiful. But before I tell it to you, my dear readers, I need to make a clarification. Now what you are going to read is not as intense as what I felt as I was watching the sky.

I always imagine the lines that I’m going to write as I see something, but when I come to write them, they seem dull and their glory greatly attenuated.

I don’t know why.

So I went out yesterday, to drop a pair of pants that my mom had forgotten to pack with her when she left to Paris, at one of her friends’ house, because she was also going to Paris. I told myself I’d make a detour, a small stroll in the car, before I come back home.

And a detour I made.

After having almost gotten lost in the narrow, confusing streets of Ras El-Nabaa' [that's where the friend lives], I emerged victorious next to the french embassy and found my way back to my initial detour.

Off to the corniche I went, because I’d been reading Rebecca earlier, and I really wanted to hear the sound of waves. Those waves that were heard by the nameless narrator, who strolled on the shore of Manderley with her Rochester-ish husband Maxim De Winter on one windy afternoon.

I wanted to smell the shores of Beirut, and include myself in the romanticism of that image portrayed so beautifully in the description of the sea where Rebecca drowned.

And so I did. I stopped my car, and waited inside.

I didn’t want to go out, because of the annoying men, who usually found it amusing to creep girls out with their smiles and random verbal harassment.

My gaze astray, I found myself surprised at the blinking of the sky. The blackness that I’d been staring onto just a minute ago swiftly shifted. The sky was lit. The clouds, with shades going from navy blue to dark gray, were illuminated for a quarter of a second. And then the sky plunged back again into its usual darkness. It was fast, very, very fast. But it was beautiful. And I wanted to stay some more. I wanted to get out of the car and walk onto the wet pavement.

And I did.

I watched the waves. Their white foam was brighter than all else, and I heard them swell and crash [thank you Khaled Hosseini, for this beautiful imagery that I’m allowing myself to steal from you] onto the rocks underneath in a violent energy.

And who said that magic did not exist?

See, if you backed away from the sea, you could see the tiny crystals of salt flying in the air, right under the fake lantern. They looked like faerie dust, waiting to fall on someone’s fate and change its course.

Of course, they didn’t.

And I went home, and finished the movie mom had interrupted with her phone call. 
Where was my mind? Watching the movie, of course. [And for the record, the movie was Fightclub.]

Spectacular.

Taaaa

Sarah