Letter to Beirut
A city is not healed by motion. Sometimes it is healed by permission to stop.
Dear Beirut,
You have become too good at continuing.
Every catastrophe arrives, breaks something visible, and within days someone is serving coffee beside it. The table returns before the window does. The generator coughs, the valet reappears, the sidewalk adjusts, the joke is made, the glass is swept into a corner. Outsiders call this resilience. They mean it kindly. They do not always understand the insult.
Resilience is what people praise when they have no intention of repairing what hurt you.
You do not need another district designed for movement, consumption, and spectacle. You do not need another polished surface where the citizen is welcome only as a customer. You need places where no one asks why you are sitting there. A bench under shade. A square that does not belong to a party. A park where the poor can remain as long as the rich. A city room that holds sorrow without monetizing it.
The old Beirut was not innocent. It was unequal, noisy, vain, cruel, alive. But it understood friction. It knew that a city is not an image. It is the inconvenience of other people made bearable by habit.
May your next reconstruction remember that.
May it build places for dwelling, not only for passing through.
With affection and impatience, Karim
