The first thought I have, as he waves from a distance, is fine, even after December, he still makes me feel some way. The second thought is—his shoes are the color of a shiny eggplant.

“Who allowed them?” I point at Zakaria’s feet as he squeezes past a long table, beyond the leafy orchids and flickering candles, and climbs toward an elevated concrete ledge where I stand, already somewhat depleted. 

“Hello, Nadia,” he laughs. His jutted tooth sticks to his lip. “I forget how gentle you are.” We hug quickly. I’m noticeably taller in the new heels. 

And yes, I’m still overwhelmed with that photography project—the one on Beirut’s tower blocks and balustrades; correct, I no longer understand the point of it. (“Of the project, or photography?” he asks.) No, he doesn’t feel he belongs in Berlin, that’s a stretch, but at least there’s an Arab community in the city, and the pay is good and Marieke is very happy, spends her time making ceramics.

Marieke and Zakaria, I think to myself, somewhere in their wooden Neukölln kitchen, drinking coffee from artisanal mugs she’s created with her hands. 

“Enjoying the wedding?” he asks in conclusion of our small talk. We turn toward the crowd at the same time. Our friends, and the friends of our friends, clap and cheer for Tala and Ahmad as they move in and out of each other’s arms. Above them disco balls spin from a cream-colored canopy. It makes me dizzy to watch.

“She’s looking around,” he begins his skit in classical Arabic. He searches my face for context clues and I click my tongue in mock annoyance to let him know I’d seen this coming. “She’s wondering: Who among us has changed, who hasn’t? Who is lonely and who is trying their best not to be?” The melodramatic voice goes up a notch. “She senses this collective numbness is here to stay, but isn’t it curious that despite it—people are here to celebrate? It is this she is most interested in, this hopeful nostalgia underneath the baseline indifference.” Zakaria loves to make me sound this way because he’s terrified of being the sentimental one.

“She’s wondering when the buffet will be served, actually,” I say. 

“Arak?” He hovers his glass near my chin. When I move closer he pulls it away. We giggle like children and a pleasant shiver runs down my back once I have a sip. Behind us the mountains undulate in mist. The air in the Chouf is cool, moonlight blurring behind thick clouds. Zakaria pats my shoulder as though to note—I know your mannerisms, that convulsion after arak. 

Then he points at Hana walking into the wedding reception with a baby on her waist. Our friends have noticed her entrance too. In their dresses and ties, they flock toward a new mother and her baby to perform the adult delight in small things. Zakaria jumps down to the grass to follow suit. I point at my D’Orsay heels and he holds his hand out to me, then says, “Who allowed them?”

—

I met Zakaria a decade ago, when he walked into the film screenings I ran in my senior year. His beard was coarse and he was short in a masculine sort of way. Later I’d joke that he was born a little man. “My mother says I didn’t cry at birth,” he conceded. He loved being thought of as stoic.

After the screening I saw him in the smoking area, where he stood with friends discussing the film. It was dark and branches of the banyan tree made a little performance with their shadows. The campus was always somewhat mystical at night.

“It’s nice to watch such films,” Zakaria said across the distance. He gestured me over with his head like we’d known each other a lifetime. “And which character are you?” he asked with some degree of irony.

“What do you mean?” 

“Which of Maroun Baghdadi’s characters are you? The poet, the photographer, the businessman, the dancer, the farmer?”

“We’re not at war, so it doesn’t count.” My voice sounded hollow and long. He lifted his shoulders as though to say, Are we not?

We loitered on campus for another hour or so. His friends were also Syrian sophomores who studied politics and economics and made breezy references to historical events. I noticed that most questions were directed at Zakaria, who offered unorthodox responses that made us laugh. He possessed what I later learned was an intelligent and intentional lack of seriousness.

“The photographer,” I admitted to myself for the first time, hours after Zakaria and his friends walked me to my dorm on Siddani Street. “I want to be the photographer.” 

I’d studied architecture at university because my parents refused to pay for a degree in photography—but my childhood summers had all been at my grandparents’ house in Beit Mery, with my uncle’s Nikon F5. My uncle had covered the Lebanese civil war before he grew disillusioned with violence and international agencies and missions. He fell out with the family because of his leftist politics and in love with an Argentine woman who helped him migrate to South America and focus on silk floss trees and coral reefs as subjects instead. Before my uncle moved we’d sit together on my grandparents’ velvet cabriole couch and watch films by Martin Scorcese and Abbas Kiorastami and he’d ask what I liked, and why. All morning and into the evening I’d try to capture the sun dissolving into the mountains; Beirut’s flicker below; my grandmother’s veiny hands kneading dough in the kitchen. The lens made what was around me real, worth claiming. 

Something always jumped in my stomach when I’d see Zakaria on campus, but it took two years—and running into him on a Tuesday night in Hamra after he graduated—for that feeling to land. 

He sat near the entrance of the café, typing furiously into a laptop. The café was loud, everyone speaking over each other. I tapped his table and he broke into a boyish smile.

“So, the activist becomes an academic?” I asked, after he shared that he’d been accepted into an elite London university on a scholarship. It would be his first time abroad. He shook his head as though ashamed. He made fun of his research topic, technology and violence in Syria’s civil war. He said something along the lines of, if you can’t beat them, study them. 

“How will your international friends understand your humor?”

“I’ll call for help, I know you’re good with foreigners.” 

I frowned, almost flattered. He was referring to the French exchange student I’d dated in university.

“It’s amazing you’ve taken on photography full time. Now I can’t imagine you being anything else,” he would say after he’d closed his laptop and I’d let go of my deadline. We stood on Makdissi Street to drink in the heat. Red lights from Hamra’s pubs turned his brown eyes amber. This was Beirut in its good days, spilling with hip-hop and happy graduates, and everywhere you turned, someone was in the process of a drunken admission. 

We were walking toward the sea when Zakaria confessed himself that he’d always wanted to ask me out. 

“But I was a sophomore and you were a senior,” he said.

“And what’s changed now?” I laughed.

Later that night I lay on his mattress in a shabby room in Ain Mreisseh to watch him roll down the shades. Patches of hair grew wild like forests on his shoulders. 

“Tell me a story,” I asked. He was looking for the right song, switched from Yasmine Hamdan to Yusef Lateef. His speaker was small and it vibrated on his bedside table.

“A story?” He sat beside me, crossing his stout legs over the mattress. “Well.” He hesitated as though uncertain whether to share, then smiled. It was hard to explain but he had a way of making me feel translucent, as though he could see through me into something I’d always be too small to understand.

“When I was a child, my dream was to become a Shawarma Master—I’d stand outside the shops in Damascus and watch the skewer spinning, and it felt like some sort of magic.”

I laughed, imagined him in Damascus, alert and little, and wanted to be there with him, too. 

“Seriously,” he continued, “isn’t it such an elegant choreography? The slice, the layering, the roll, the flick over the burner. And then, right after a sandwich is done, the way the Master wipes the knife on his shirt, dips it into the oil, and proceeds with the next order.”

“So, basically you want to be someone people queue over?”

All night we talked—he had a kind mother, and I didn’t; I had a privileged life, and he didn’t. It was easy to laugh, harder to feel close. Bodies are designed to be separate, I thought.

“It’s so nice to talk to you, Nadia,” he muffled before dozing off again.

—

We block the entrance to the wedding reception. Everyone makes a fuss about Hana’s baby; they frown when it cries and purr when it blinks. I hide behind the camera’s face, take a picture of the baby’s peachy cheeks and tuft of hair, promise Hana to send the photographs though she hasn’t asked for them.

“I think I’m finally beginning to understand why people do this,” Tala announces, tickling the baby’s toes. 

“Take note,” Hana says to Ahmad. “The baby fever has begun.” Tala shakes her head in exaggerated motions, and chuckles at her now-husband like he knows exactly what she thinks about having babies. 

Later in the night, after the cake and champagne, I’m dragged from my chair to the dance floor. Wilted petals mark the stage like commas. Everyone sweats and laughs, then drinks some more. I keep my camera on like a heavy necklace and shuffle from one end to another. I zoom into my friends’ animated faces and oily noses. When Maryam Saleh’s song comes on, the one Zakaria and I played and replayed that winter, some years ago now, I fight the urge to turn though I sense his body to the left, feet spinning, hands in air, hovering, a face out of focus—not mine to capture.

—

He yanks me from the crowd. I’d predicted this moment earlier in the day while driving though I shook my head in my car’s rear view mirror and pretended not to.

“A walk?” he asks. The venue is in the middle of a pine grove. No one pays us any mind as we cross the stone path and step outside. My heels sink into the soil and I try to aim for the twisting roots of trees. 

“Just a short walk,” he says when I halt. 

“My feet hurt.” 

“Do you want to head back?”

We pause, then backtrack through the gate and toward the reception before I stop halfway and point at plastic chairs I’d noticed on our way out. I cross one leg over the other after we sit. It is always the same with us, exhaustingly so. The soles of my feet throb and I pick at a mosquito bite on my ankle. 

“How are you?” he asks. 

“With regards to the state of the world?” I say. “Distressed. Disturbed. Deeply unwell.”

He makes an expression with his cheeks. His tie is lopsided and the sweat patch on his chest is large like a puddle. 

“Hana says you’ve been a bit of an urban hermit,” he says. “I’m trying to not take it too personally that we haven’t really spoken in so long.”

November was the last time we’d seen each other. He’d flown in from Berlin for a panel in Beirut and we managed to see each other a couple times in Badaro’s cafes near his hotel. We ordered one espresso after another and talked like the younger versions of ourselves. I told him about the new films I hated. He criticized a paper he was revising on aid provision in Northwestern Syria. He was worried about his mother growing old and lonely in Damascus and had arranged for her to come visit. I was supposed to finally meet her but she’d caught a virus. And what would he have introduced me as—a photographer based in Beirut? His long-time friend from university? The lover it never worked out with, whom he now sees intermittently when he’s away from the lover it appears to have worked out with? 

“I don’t know, Nadia,” he continues self-consciously. “You haven’t really responded to my messages or calls in months.”

He’d called once and sent a total of two messages since November.

“Oh?” I say. 

He continues to speak and I imagine telling him about December, a sense of satisfaction flooding my body. I’d paint the month like a canvas: the small plastic bag on my couch with the tests inside, how warm my living room had felt before I left it for the bathroom. The perfectly round tablets my body refused. That agonizing week I spent, alone, waiting for blood that wouldn’t come. The blinking knowledge I gathered late at night, into the dawn, bargaining with the bright glare of my phone. Like how human gestation takes 266 days, only six days more than an orangutan’s. (The African elephant’s gestation is the longest one among land mammals—640 days.) Terms from sixth-grade biology class drawn in new ways: zygotes, endometrial cells, progesterone, β-HCG. 

I fantasize about his reaction, the startled brown eyes and front tooth—maybe there will be tears, a plea for forgiveness. But why didn’t you tell anyone? he’d ask. We would’ve wanted to know. And it’s true, I know my friends would’ve come with me to all the appointments, maybe even curled beside me on the gray couch as I compulsively stuck a thermometer under my tongue to gauge the infection. They would’ve been there when, a week later, I drove myself to the hospital in loose-fitting sweatpants and an itchy wool sweater. Sat in the reception area with a fake name—Maha Botrous—while the anaesthesiologist injected my back in the dark room where I lay, without my contacts or glasses, listening to the wailing old man beside me who said he missed his mother. I would’ve allowed them to hold my hands while I waited for feeling to return to my legs. I would’ve told them how my doctor entered the room and looked at me, clenched in my white gown, teeth chattering, and said, You can cry if you want to.

“I don’t know, Nadia, I guess I’d like to talk about it,” he says.

“About?” 

“About you. How you’ve been, I mean. Our relationship. Our—our friendship.” The more he blinks, the more I realize he’s quite drunk, in need of reassurance. 

“Why?”

“I want to feel like we’re still in each other’s lives—”

“But we’re not.” 

“But we can learn to be—I think we can try, no?” 

It’s in these moments that I find Zakaria most exasperating, with his intact perception that love is a state of being—not something to be grasped, or worked for. That once there is love, it is unconditional, and we must obey its maze regardless of where it takes us or doesn’t. He could be on a vacation with Marieke and in the middle of it, send me a song that reminded him of me. He could disappear for months and then tell me that I didn’t allow myself to be found.  

All December I contemplated this sentiment. Well, say I wanted to be found, Zakaria, who could you have showed up at the hospital as?

“Nadia,” he says, suddenly amused. “Look at Salim.” 

On the dance floor, Salim is shirtless and wearing aviator sunglasses. Everyone cheers him on, Ziad and Abdel-Karim trying to sit his skinny body onto their shoulders. They are successful on the fourth try and Salim slides between them, fists pumping into the air. The sight makes us laugh and something cracks in the air.

“Weddings are nice,” I offer.

“Nadia wants to get married?” he teases. 

“It’s not about marriage—but I’ve been thinking a lot about institutions and rituals,” I say, after a long pause. “If there’s something necessary about them, if they protect us from ourselves, somehow.” 

“I don’t know,” Zakaria says. “It worries me to think of human beings as so predictable. I want to believe we’re not the same, that we don’t all arrive at our thirties and suddenly become desperate for the same things.”

“And I worry about you,” I say humorously.

“Worry about me?”

“You’re stuck, I see it more with time, this life you’ve built for yourself in Berlin, your open relationship with Marieke? It’s some sort of protective mechanism or reaction, an easy way out.”

I had meant to sound composed, maybe slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the sentiment arrives in exclamation marks, feverish and troubled. He swallows, preparing for a response. Then he shrugs as though whatever it is he’s devised has been discussed too many times and to no avail, so we sit in silence as the wedding propels itself forward. 

Somewhere along the way, through the years of this strange and large love, our perpetual drift and inevitable returns, we’d felt that what we shared had no name, no structure. And we thought, or at least had convinced ourselves to think, that this shapelessness gave us room to play, to mold our love and friendship into what we needed at the time, and that it would somehow work with the in-between lives we’d built, that it would carry us through the decay of the city where we’d met and fallen in love—despite the fact that he no longer lived here, despite the fact that he’d been with someone else for a couple years now. But the feeling I’d had since December, that I feel more acutely now as I sit near him in his sweaty frustration, is that this love isn’t shapeless, no, it’s one long corridor with no clear exit, and as long as I stay inside it, I’ll remain small and bound, outwalked by everyone: him and Marieke, my friends, my body, even the city itself.  

“Well,” I say. A fly circles over morsels of cake on the grass. He attempts to shoo it away with a swift kick.

“It’s fine,” he says after a while. The fly darts in haphazard loops over Zakaria’s face but he doesn’t seem to notice it. “Maybe you’re right.”

“About?”  

“I think I hate Berlin,” he chuckles.

“Don’t go back, then.” I force myself to chuckle as well.

“Every time I imagine returning, I feel this cement block on my chest,” he says. “It’s cold and gray, and somehow everyone thinks of it as this open little city of music and drugs—but I keep thinking: what’s underneath all the concrete?”

“Why not stay here? You can move back. You’ll find a job at a university immediately.”

“That’s the hard part,” he says. “This realization that my life—our life—is there now.”

Before I have time to respond, Ahmad emerges from behind a tree to say he’d noticed us on his walk from the bathroom. His lisp, enhanced by the length of the night, makes his request to return to the dance floor difficult to resist. I tell Zakaria to go ahead, that I’ll join in a second. As soon as they leave, I take my heels off and a great weight falls off my body. The fly approaches my face, loops above it, then buzzes away.

—

The car ignites and I reverse out of the parking lot with my bare feet. 

Of all the horrors of abortion, it is the anesthesia I remember most, that precise injection in the middle of my back, the three hours spent afterwards in a small hospital bed, severed in half, the legs below no longer mine and this spine, my spine, having nothing but a quiet and infinite emptiness to hover above, to cling onto.

I drive past dark mountains and spindly trees. Not a single star visible in the sky. Moving downward on the sinuous roads I feel a certain degree of freedom, a sadness as obscure as it is unconditional. Why had I lied? Weddings are not nice. Weddings are humiliating. I roll the windows down and fresh air rushes in. 

I realize soon after I’ve turned left onto the Damour Road that my phone is somewhere underneath a tablecloth at the wedding.  

It is in the middle of this pity interlude that a cloud shifts to allow my sight of the moon. There, in the middle of the highway, the moon, nearly full and copper-gold in color, suspends. Some sense, akin to annihilation, presses on my chest and I sit up to distribute its weight. How hadn’t I noticed the moon earlier, why did no one point it out—where had it been? Out of habit, I think of parking on the side of the road to take photographs but my foot remains committed to the accelerator, driving past billboards and drive-through espresso stands and dead dogs discarded on the highway. 

I feel an urge to sing, or to listen to an old and devastating song. I feel an urge to be Maha Botrous again. I feel an urge to call my uncle in Argentina and ask if he still believes in photography.

Radio One insists on Bruno Mars. The dreadful song reminds me of that year it was popular, when I’d gone to visit Zakaria in London and we walked near his campus on Russell Square eating soggy egg sandwiches. It began to rain and we were without umbrellas so we rushed to the British Museum like a scene out of a bad romantic comedy. We laughed a lot that afternoon, imagined shattering the glass and freeing the stolen Egyptian sculptures. An old couple shot glances at Zakaria, who obnoxiously role-played an art historian lecturing me on the merits of Greek vases and the statue of a horse. It all felt ridiculous: art, its production and conservation and distribution, the historical importance we granted it, the language surrounding it.

All those sculptures inside vitrines, I think to myself now, cold and maintained, protected from dust and warmth and vandalism. And why had I allowed myself such preservation? 

I drive underneath a pitch-black tunnel and take a right toward my neighborhood, the apartment where I’d built my life alone. Our life, Zakaria had said about his and Marieke’s. Our life.

Out of nowhere, a delivery motorcyclist beeps at me. I hit the brakes and look to my side; I hadn’t noticed him, had taken a left without giving a signal.

“Watch where you’re going,” he spits, his foot extended on the pavement for balance.

He has thick black hair, vulgar tattoos covering both arms. This sort of near accident happens every day in Beirut, but it occurs to me now that I could’ve killed this young man on his way to deliver food and drinks to an impatient customer at home. 

I shout out the window, “I’m sorry—I’m really so sorry.”

He shrugs, surprised at my bizarre reaction, having expected a round of fighting between driver and motorcyclist. 

Behind my building, the moon is buried again by the city’s clouds and antennae. I step out of my car, so phoneless and barefoot and ridiculous I could almost laugh. Flashing images of the wedding shoot at the back of my head—chafing dishes of warm food lining a buffet; the sponginess of cake; Salim’s naked and ecstatic torso; the guaranteed flicker, then gradual decline, of taper candles; the darkening range of mountains at night; a baby’s eyes, wise and blue, waking to the world. All the images I’ll never take.

It strikes me that nothing in me is dead, or of the past. It strikes me that I can be the sort of person who accepts the disappearance of a love, even a self, that no longer is. The sort of person whose body can bring forth life and let it go and start again. ■

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