At dinner I’m trying to explain the Lebanese civil war. And numbers just didn’t, couldn’t explain it. 6% of the population died. 40% of the total population fled, never to return. One day out of nowhere my parents came home, frantic, panicked. The family was ushered into our

apartment. The men of the neighbourhood, had to rush downstairs with any weapon they had. There were militias roaming the streets. Sandbags appeared out of nowhere, blockades where we normally played, men that normally sold kids candy, clutching rifles & checking ID to ensure

Anyone coming or going wasn’t a danger to our block. My parents would discuss in hushed whispers that the banks were closed, their money just... gone. One neighbour, that doted on my baby brother, had a hen that laid one egg a day. Every morning she would take him, feed him the

Egg. The baby needed it. My mother was so grateful she quietly cry as she handed him over for a “breakfast visit”. Life would go back to semi normal, school, work, then out of nowhere, shelling. Locked in bomb shelters for hours, waiting to be told it was safe to go up again.

At times there were shortages of fresh food, my mama once went around seeing if anyone had planted anything green they could part with. One man saw her holding the baby & called her over, he had two stalks of silver beet, half grown. She asked if she could take just one, she

Could pay him anything. He laughed, and called her “binteh”, a word for daughter, and said her money was useless, it was a war, we couldn’t eat money. It wasn’t when my mum was shot, or when they stormed the beach during a ceasefire, and everyone was hysterical with fear

moving as fast as the wind to evacuate their families over the pebble scattered beach of the Mediterranean Sea. But little things, like the corner at the end of the street where they stacked the bodies, or forgetting the taste of an orange. How do I explain this? In Brisbane,

30 years later, watching my son play. How do I explain the guilt that we were part of the 40% that fled. How do I explain any of it? No need for any responses to this. I just needed to word vomit. I ended up just sticking to the numbers, the percentages, finishing my burger. /end