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As my friends and I stood on the bridge, we examined the map once again. We had been walking for several hours already. We had followed the map, and it led us here, to this bridge, spanning the two halves of the city.

There was an unsettling feeling in the air. And this fog. Heavy. Unusual for this time of year. It seeped into our already damp clothing and made us shiver. As we reached the middle of the bridge, we paused and peered through the shifting mist. From this spot, we would normally see the whole city. The mountains on one side, and the city fabric stretching down to the sea on the other. But that night, Beirut was a mass of diffuse grey shadows, overlapping the familiar shapes of the city. We stood quietly in this spot, marked with an X on the map. We had arrived. But to what? And where?

We noticed a metal switchback staircase that descended along the exterior of the bridge’s central pier. It was wide enough only for one person, zigzagging towards the water below. Carefully, we descended the steps, grasping the cold iron railing, until we arrived at a concrete landing that wrapped about the base of the pier. And there we discovered what we were meant to find: framed within the pillar of the bridge, an improbable wooden door. And on its face, illuminated in flickering neon letters, we read the following words:

THIS  IS  BEIRUT

A strange sensation overcame us as we stood before this door. A door that defied structural logic. That shouldn’t have existed. Yet it was there, on a concrete island, lost between the two banks of a river that does not run through our city.

The map had been with us more than a year already. It was an ordinary city map, the kind that you buy at a gas station. This wasn’t our first night of wandering. We had been looking for answers, for some alternate to the violence that seemed to be sealed in the walls of our city, paved into the streets. Beirut had grown hopeless. Claustrophobic. Every route led us back to the conflict. Our hunger for motion, for change, kept us pacing the avenues and alleyways. Fruitlessly searching for a way out of our demoralized circuit. We had almost given up. But on that night, the X had appeared, pulling us from our various flats and occupations, igniting in us a small hope.

As we nudged the narrow door, we held our breath with anticipation. And with fear. But to our surprise, there was nothing inside — or very little. It opened to a short flight of steps that led down to a single rectangular room. The room was empty, with austere white walls. Not a single window, object, or observable source of light could be seen.

We laid the map out on the floor in the center of the room, uncertain where to go from here. However, as we unfolded it, it seemed to keep opening, fold after fold, longer and wider, more expansive than it had been. As it filled the space, we tried to find the X, to orient ourselves again. But it had disappeared. In fact, the lines of the map seemed blurred, and ended midway, as though they’d been erased. This room was a dead end. Like the city. A trap.

“Is this Beirut?” we thought: “a room filled with nothing, caught between the two banks of the city? Is this where our quest ends?” There must be — there should be — something else.  The room, the map, explained nothing. I stepped away from the map towards a blank wall and pressed my palm onto the surface, gently at first and then again more firmly. To my surprise, I realized that my hand had left a hole in the wall. What seemed to be a thick, impenetrable surface was in fact a brittle, tenuous one. An illusion. 

From this hole, still shrouded in fog, we could distinguish our space. The portion of the city where we have always lived. Where we buy our ice cream, hang our laundry, undress our lovers, study, work. We could see its familiar grocers, bookstores, and vendors selling water and umbrellas. We could make out our neighbours going about their business, hands stuffed in their pockets, or trailing a thin stream of cigarette smoke.

We turned as one towards the opposite wall. With a determined movement my friend struck a blow into the wall, at eye level. From the new opening we could see the opposite side of the city. The space of ‘the Others’. And moving within it, the Others themselves. We watched them with their monstrous hats and their strange gestures, walking their long shadows through their unfamiliar streets, filled with unsettling music and wares we could not recognize.

Standing in the center of the room, we looked one way and then the other. It was fascinating to witness from the same vantage point, two spaces, two opposing visions of the city, at once so discordant and so similar. And unmistakable through both holes were the snaking barrier of “The Green Line” with its fortifications, towers, arrow-slits, barbed wires, flags, statues of saints, and pictures of martyrs.

A long time ago, we had drawn this line. At first our aim was simply to separate ‘Us’ from ‘Them’, to make the boundary clear. But over time, this line evolved into a physical barrier. Monumental walls were erected, gradually isolating our space from 'the others’, from 'what lies across the border’.

We could see it now, as we watched our space and the other space come in and out of focus through the fog — we had made the green line, and in return it had made us. It enclosed our space, but it also enclosed our being in the world. Leaving us in conflict with any other realities, with any other ways of being which were foreign to us.

So we began making holes, big and small, in the walls of the room. We punched and carved and tore openings and apertures. With each breach of the wall, we felt a sense of liberation, of breaking free from limitations. We could feel the breath expand in our bodies as the horizon expanded. Each hole, each opening that we created, allowed us to see our city from new perspectives. The room was crumbling around us, and we felt for the first time we could truly see.

We could see our Beirut, and their Beirut, but mixed in amongst them, other Beiruts as well. Beiruts we had dreamed of or never imagined. Beiruts multiplying and unfolding in every direction. Beiruts that would not hold still, that rose up one from the other, and replicated and altered themselves. ad infinitum.

With the city undulating and shifting around us, my friends and I sat down around the map on the floor, now smudged and blurred beyond recognition. We believed we were looking for a way out, but the map led us to a way in. Beirut has been waiting for us to set it free. To scatter its old lines. And to dream up new ones.