Autumn

The talk in England is of puddles, and gumboots, and leaves gold orange gold and blackberries in the hedgerows. Farming Today chunters comfortably along at Lebanese breakfast time, mulling over E. Coli, milk prices and bumper crops of oysters. Not the closing of a year, but a more subtle season of renewal than spring, with its gambolling lambs and expansive daffodils. By September, you know what is what. For twenty or so of my years, this has been the month of new terms; exercise books, name tapes, hockey sticks, Chipie agendas from Carrefour, a small step up the inky ladder of education. You can look ahead through mists of pencil sharpenings to knitted scarves and a chill in the air, or back through who knows what permutations of the year to when you looked on it with fresh eyes.

The talk in Lebanon is of Eid al-Fitr, and ministerial resignations, and Katyusha rockets fired into Israel. Hariri junior comes and goes, the Special Tribunal chess piece is bartered back and forth, Syria and Iran loom over the news with their customary intransigence. In Zouk, you can now walk to the market or take a bus without feeling the sweat course down you in ticklish runnels. Around sunset, the day now no longer feels exhausted, but cooler and freshly shadowed. You can smell the evening, where before there was nothing but pollution and dust and wanting to lie under the air con with no more movement than the languid antennae strokes of a poisoned cockroach.

Has it really been nearly two months? Both nothing, and something. Lost thesis days, days learning the peculiar frustrations of work, days making plans and not always achieving them. Some days that sang with light and colour, some that left you exhausted and miserable. Ridiculous days spent on an affair that has done no one any favours. In less than a week he will back among those puddles and gumboots and in the arms of a better woman than I, and I will be able to start again, again. There is nothing to do but bide one’s time for days when one makes progress.

And so it goes, the uneasy mounting of impression on impression. We are nowhere near even a vague idea of how this might eventually shake out. Not the close of a year, then, and the new beginning now receding, but days requiring patience, and some grit. We are both waiting, Lebanon and I. Still, but not for long - or perhaps forever.