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My favourite part of our family's annual trip to Lebanon was our DIY fireworks show. We used to visit my Teta and Gedo every summer.
Once every few weeks, my dad would drive up the mountain to a convenience store in Ras el-Matn – it was like a Mac's, but with no windows, more fruit candies and suspicious no-name cereals – and bring back a box of fireworks.
Once it got dark, he would call my two brothers and me out to the driveway and we would take turns lighting each firework. Jude and Bilal fought about whose turn it was while I pretended to be generous and would donate my turn. The truth is, I was just too scared that the flame would hit my hand or I'd get caught in the sparks.
On most visits, my brothers and I shared a cramped room in my grandparents' Beirut apartment. With no air conditioning, we kept cool with one useless rotating fan and an open window with no screen.
No breeze came through the window, but the sounds of the city sure did. One night, instead of hearing cars whizzing by, sporadic music, random ringing or yelling – what they call "silence" in Beirut – I heard a huge pop followed by some cracks, more pops and a weeoup sound.
Fireworks!
I slid out of bed and walked over to the window, switching the fan off rotating mode and pointing it toward my bed on the way – my brothers were already asleep, so I could finally hog the breeze without a fight. I sat a metre away from the window, scared I might fall out, and waited for another firework. I could hear the pops and cracks going for a while, but never saw so much as a spark. I was disappointed. "Baba does them better anyway," I thought.
At the breakfast table the next morning, I munched on labneh with olives and some eggs, then zoned out while my grandparents and parents talked urgently. It was the last calm moment of my trip. We left the next day.
What should have been a two-month vacation was shortened to less than one.
I'm 16 now and while I don't remember too much of the summer, I do remember the way home; it was the longest journey I have ever taken.
My parents huddled the five of us – plus our six massive suitcases – into a little taxi with an unsettling urgency; later, I would come to recognize it as a mixture of terror and protectiveness that stirs in them as children of war.
As the taxi driver swerved down the mountain road, I felt nausea kick in. Either someone had pulled the brakes out of his car, or he had entirely forgotten they were there. We zoomed by the side streets that I had come to know so well. Side streets that, 20 years earlier, were ruined by Israeli invasions and civil war.
I haven't been back in six years, but today, I can still picture them: one-lane roads treated as three-lane streets, corn carts pushed around by their struggling vendors, perfumeries with scents that only your grandma would wear, markets selling everything from fans to hookahs and shops with baklava and nuts.
We drove by my favourite bakery and I wanted to stop for one last cheese pie, but my parents urged the driver on, we were too rushed to stop.
Eventually, the taxi slowed down and pulled up to a curb near a tall fence; a lot of people were lined up beside it. We joined the line, which lead to a small plastic table at the far end of a huge, hollow room lit by a skylight. People shuffled in over dirty carpeted floors and wandering dust. Each group of 100 or so approached the plastic table and received a coloured wristband. The colour given would change: yellow, brown, red, blue, green, orange, purple and so on. Our group got brown.
Then, my parents found a spot to settle and wait. We set up a little luggage fort, which would be where we slept. The next morning, we boarded a ferry, which I had mistaken for a tiny plane.
But it couldn't have been a plane; the airport was out of service after being hit by a bomb. A few days after my family left, Israeli bombs would kill Lebanese civilians in the streets we'd whizzed past and all those shops would be rubble again.
What I remember most of that journey home was swallowing lots of motion-sickness pills and still throwing up on my favourite funky flowered yoga pants. My mom promised that no one would see if I changed under the seat. I forced myself to do it but I felt humiliated.
Once I was old enough, my parents told me their version of that vacation. The fireworks I heard that night in my grandparents' apartment weren't fireworks at all, they were bombs.
Darla lives in Toronto.