Traumatized by The Fear of War In the Streets

I read the newspaper headline: "One last chance for a settlement, or chaos." If this episode of madness is not wrapped up in the coming hours, it's probably going to mean Lebanon's new civil war is starting.

Then a smaller headline catches my eye, accompanied by a beautiful picture of a young smiling couple. The engagement of Jad and Ruba aborted by sectarian barricades. Page 4. I turn to the page. Instead of a bigger picture of Jad and Ruba, I face a picture of a masked gunman, with a caption "No room for love here."

For days, I've been wanting to weep and now, in my hotel restaurant, I read the story of Jad and Ruba, and I cry.

Yes, I am living in a hotel, three miles away from my own house. My daughters? I've sent them away, to my parents, in another city. It's safer there. My life? I lost it somewhere between my abandoned apartment and my absent children whom I miss so much.

I joke about all this. I moved to the liberated areas, I keep saying. I laugh about this with friends. It's really not funny. Nothing is funny about what's been happening. Nothing is funny about discovering how vulnerable you, your life and your dreams are.

It all feels so surreal. To discover one night that war could be so close. That it could happen today, in your own neighborhood. To stay awake all night because of the sound of gunfire, right next door.

To leave your house in the morning and find five armed masked men, with black stern eyes standing at your door. You don't recognize them, but they're probably guys you've smiled at a million times.

It is not amusing when you drive along the main shopping street in Beirut and find a closed Starbucks cafe occupied by armed people sitting around with their rifles and RPGs.

It's weird, when you have to stop at a checkpoint and give your ID to a boy hardly past puberty, dying to use his gun.

Feeling threatened, not by random coincidence but because of who you are -- because of your sect, or profession, or political opinions -- is such a suffocating feeling.

It's traumatizing, when your phone rings in the middle of the night and a man named Ibrahim, calling from an unknown number, tells you that news coverage from the satellite TV station where you are a correspondent is a little bit too much, and that you should be careful. It's weird when you ask his name and he says, "That's not important. What's important is that you be careful." It's terrifying when you are outside Beirut and people from your office tell you not to come near the city, that if you decide to come anyway your security is your own responsibility. I don't even know what that means.

It's not funny when you call the army and ask for protection and you're told that it's not the army's job to protect you, that maybe lowering the tone of your TV coverage could protect you. It is not funny when you keep getting phone calls from people, known and unknown (I really have no idea where everybody is getting my phone number!), telling you to be careful, that nothing is worth it, and so you wake up your husband in the middle of the night and tell him you want to go to a hotel.

It is terrifying when an opposition TV channel launches a campaign accusing you of being an Israeli agent. In Lebanon, that's a crime punishable by law. Worse, on the streets it can get you killed. It's not personal, you're told, but there's a war now.

We joke about all this. We joke about what we now call the immigration of pens to the neighborhood of Ashrafieh, all those journalists living in hotel rooms.

Do you think our lives will ever be the same again, I asked a friend. No, he answered, and I know he is right.

What happened this past week is too big, it's too tragic. My fear this week was very real. My anger was real. My disappointment to learn that I was right about Hezbollah militants was real. I was right to fear them. To fear what they're capable of. This week, they proved that they're capable of burning everything. They proved that if you're not with them, you're against them, and they can kill you for it. In the name of the cause, they say. What cause? How in one week, I've become the enemy. Why am I the enemy? They're out of arguments. The only argument they have left is the argument of guns and power. Strong arguments, I have to say, that don't convince anyone.

I read the story of Jad and Ruba, and cry. That's the saddest part of the story. To know for sure that love doesn't belong here.