Flickr/Lion Media Productions. Some rights reserved.When a friend told me past midnight to check the news about Paris, I had no idea that I would be looking at a map of a city I love, delineating locations undergoing terrorist attacks simultaneously. I zoomed in on that map closer; one of the locations was right next to where I had stayed when I was there in 2013, down that same boulevard.
The more I read, the higher the number of fatalities rose. It was horrible; it was dehumanizing; it was utterly and irrevocably hopeless: 2015 was ending the way it had started—with terrorist attacks occuring in Lebanon and France almost at the same time, in the same context of demented creatures spreading hate and fear and death wherever they went.
I woke up this morning to two broken cities. My friends in Paris, who only yesterday were asking what was happening in Beirut, were now on the opposite side of the line. Both our capitals were broken and scarred, old news to us perhaps but foreign territory to them.
