After 9 p.m. *
Contact after nine in the evening used to be considered – until recently – a lack of respect for evening privacy, or as we simply called it: “bad manners.”
Today, however, silence after nine is what raises concern. Late-night messages, or those arriving with the first hint of dawn, have become a daily ritual to check on those we love.
The details of our lives have changed, as have our vocabulary, until the first question at the start of each day became: “Are you okay?” The night passes faster than the days in our cities, scattered between belts of poverty, misery, and destruction, or those threatened by war, or covered by a heavy cloud of anxiety.
Dawn breaks with light that shatters the darkness of a night full of apprehension, whether due to what is happening around you, or because of the continuous shelling here and there, until it seemed to spread across our towns and neighborhoods, reaching every home. Your friend asks you: “What woke you up at this hour?” And you reply, almost in a collective confession: “Has deep sleep returned?”
When pain spread across the vast expanse of the earth, and Gaza and southern Lebanon continued to suffer even after it was said that a ceasefire had begun, the voice of that Gazan man, confined to his tent, summed up the entire scene: “What ceasefire are you talking about? Don’t believe them.” Where do you begin your daily correspondence? And how? With the same question: “Stay safe… We heard the news late at night and early in the morning about you.” Perhaps you follow it with: “There is good with us and with you!”
In a touch of bitter irony, this simple phrase has become a daily prayer we all exchange. Perhaps some of us have learned, over many years of proximity to that entity, how to steal light from the heart of darkness, and how to cling to life whenever the night grows darkest and surrounds us, or when their devils try to do so. Anxiety pursues you for those you love, and you know they, in turn, are anxious about you. Details no longer matter, because everything seems interconnected within a larger project, whose outlines appear in political rhetoric, or in maps presented to the world, or in new threats added to a long record of threats. As if the message is one: live in anticipation of disaster. Perhaps the most dangerous thing they have succeeded in embedding is making anxiety a constant companion to humans since childhood.
Even in our everyday language and in much of what we repeat, fear advances. Despite all their attempts to distribute terror, and despite their wide-ranging projects, some of which leak from their tightly sealed drawers, despite all that, there remains a small space that cannot be measured by geography or balances of power in the heart or soul, or perhaps it is the deeply rooted belief in justice, especially for those who are right.
Perhaps what most confuses the architects of terror is that they do not realize that hope, like fear, also spreads. It may not stop a war, nor prevent a rocket, but it preserves within us what they want to take from us: the hope that the future will not be as they wish or plan, and that history has taught us much about victories emerging from beneath the rubble. And with every thread of dawn, we realize that the night, no matter how long, cannot monopolize the sky, as Ziad al-Rahbani said: “There is hope....”
