Between Two Worlds: A Letter To Loved Ones In Lebanon, From A Desk In Dubai

While her family waits out war at home, a daughter writes a letter from Dubai’s safer skyline…

There are two of me now.

One wakes in Dubai. Electricity is a given. Coffee stays hot. Silence is just silence.

The other never left. She is still in Bekaa, sitting beneath an olive tree that has outlived three wars, listening to the air like it might shift without warning.

My name is Dima. I am twenty-six. I am writing this in a safe little room in Dubai, trying to write like my words can protect the people I love.

My mother says “نحنا مناح… ما تخافي”; we’re fine, don’t worry; and her voice does something it never used to do. My father, who has never asked a soft question in his life, wants to know if I’m eating enough. My sister mentions the generator is running low again and laughs about it, because that is what we’ve learned to do. Laugh before the fear gets too loud. A message that starts with “طمّني” and ends with nothing because maybe the signal broke, or maybe fear did.

I hold my phone the way I used to hold their hand when I was little. Tight. As if pressing harder means safety.

I grew up in a small village in the Bekaa Valley, where the day begins before the sun does. The adhān first. Then coffee, thyme, dust, and the smell of a kitchen that has never once been empty.

Everyone in my village knows your mother’s name; what your grandfather planted; which tree you carved your initials into when you were seven.

Bekaa is wide and green and ordinary in the way that only deeply-loved places can be. Old men playing backgammon under walnut trees. My father’s sisters gathering in the courtyard as the light turns blue, talking about who is getting married, who has died, whose son finally found work abroad.

Before every road trip, we stopped at Dekkene, our tiny village supermarket. I would count my coins like treasure, always coming out with chips and the white Shaarawi gum and the quiet certainty that the world was small enough to understand.

My sisters and I sat in the back seat singing badly, fighting over nothing, while my mother and father argued about directions in that way married people do when they have been together long enough to find each other ridiculous. We thought that car was the whole world. We thought final exams were the worst thing that could happen to us.

Where did those days go?

I don’t know when I stopped believing that.

The first time I understood fear, I was six.

Jana and I were in the garden in matching dresses, eating sour grapes, fighting over whose turn it was to climb the tree. Our fingers were sticky and our mouths were sour and we were so alive in that slowness, in that boredom, in that ordinary afternoon that I did not know was precious. Then a sound came that was not thunder. I can only tell you that my body understood before my mind did. That I stood frozen while my sister ran. My cousin was screaming our names from the window. Dimaaaa! Janaaaa! Yalla!

Jana ran.

She did not hold my hand.

I had to run alone toward the house, my bare feet on the hot stones, my heart somewhere outside my chest. I still think about that. How survival can be lonely even when you’re not by yourself.

That night, my mother decided. She was pregnant. She was terrified. She took her three daughters and left. Syria first. Then Turkey. Then Algeria, where they served us orange juice on the plane and I thought we were on holiday. Then São Paulo, to her family, to something that felt like safety.

My youngest sister was born there.

She lived for eight days. Her heart was not strong enough.

I think about her sometimes. About what she didn’t have to see.

Where shall we go, my rose, in these sweet days? Where do we go when home is both the safest and most dangerous place we know?

I have the life I once thought I wanted. I am working, creating, building something of my own. And yet, there is a quiet scar stitched into everything.

Why am I here, and they are there?

Some mornings, I catch myself reaching for a version of life that no longer exists.

I catch myself in elevator mirrors sometimes. Hair done. Lipstick on. Looking like someone with nothing to worry about. You learn to carry beauty and dread in the same bag.

I walk through malls where people buy candles, try on dresses, discuss dinner plans.

Then I open my phone…

We were supposed to fall in love without thinking. Stay out too late. Worry about stupid things. Instead, we learned waiting. For news. For electricity. For the next thing. For something to hold onto.

I didn’t understand the value of a quiet life until I no longer had one.

I regret rushing through the ordinary days, not knowing they were the ones I would miss most. What if we lived in peace?

The Middle East is not a map of conflict. It is a map of continuance. Of mothers making bread at dawn and putting on lipstick before leaving the house. Of children playing in streets that have seen too much. Of young women still dreaming, still refusing to make themselves small.

We are not used to war. No one ever is. We are only good at surviving it.

And survival is not the same as living.

To my family. To my mother, who calls every morning. To my father, whose hands I miss. To my sisters, who still laugh like nothing can touch them.

I’m sorry I’m not there.

Are the rocks still there, the ones where I wrote my name? Are the grapes still sour? Is the tiny supermarket still open? Does the blue hour still come, gathering the old ones on plastic chairs, filling the air with coffee smoke and stories?

كم بكرا صار مارق من وقتها لليوم؟

أمان، أمان

وعلى بيتي خدني

Lead image courtesy of Instagram / @koko.b.art