What Remains: Musings on the Beirut Port Explosion

View from my window: the port, 2014

On August 4, 2020, the heart of Beirut was shattered. In the weeks that followed, something inside me also split — a rupture felt not only in grief, but in the surreal realization that such a catastrophic event, one that should have shaken the foundations of a broken system, led to so little change. The scale of the devastation demanded transformation. And yet, here we are. Years later, the same faces, the same structures, the same silence.

There’s a particular sadness in that — a deep, aching kind of sorrow that goes beyond mourning the lives lost or the buildings flattened. It is the sadness of betrayal. Of watching injustice prevail with impunity. Of realizing that for many in power, even the deaths of hundreds and the injuries of thousands are not enough to spark reform. The explosion was not just a physical event; it was a collapse of trust, of belief that those meant to protect us might someday do so.

And yet, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in the streets that filled with glass, blood, and the howling of sirens. I wasn’t part of the cleanup crews or the hospital queues. But Beirut lives inside me. My heart is still there — in its stubborn resilience, in its chaotic beauty, in the grief that never quite settles. There’s a strange guilt in being away, and a stranger pain in still feeling so tethered.

Hope, in this context, feels like both a necessity and a kind of madness. To hope is to resist. But sometimes it also feels naive — especially when the same entrenched powers keep spinning their wheels in the same mud. Still, I try to hold onto it. I imagine a Beirut that is free — not just from corrupt leadership, but from the weight of perpetual survival. I imagine something blooming in the cracks. Not despite the explosion, but in its wake.
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Perhaps this is what it means to love a place so deeply: to grieve its suffering, to rage at its injustices, to dream of its future even when it feels impossible. Beirut, to me, is not only a place of loss, but a place of longing — and in that longing, a quiet insistence that something better must still be possible.

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