I told myself I would not cry. I felt sad, don't get me wrong, but I had to distance myself so it wouldn't get too bad. So I sat at my desk, tweeting call outs for work, but I've just started. And I can't hold it in.

Because the older I get and the more distant that country becomes the more my heart pines for it. The more I feel for it. The greater the longing, the ache, the pain. Look at us, out there in the diaspora, building families who won't know it as our parents once did.

Who won't know its beauty or its history or its merits. Remember when they called it the Pearl of the Orient? The Paris of the Middle East? We grew up singing 'Lebnan la7 yerja3' & 'Raje3, Raje3 yet3amar'. We believed those words. We sang them with gusto. Now they feel distant.

Good parents want to give their children everything. And ever since I had my first child, six years ago, I have longed to give her and her siblings a glimpse into her heritage, into mine. Even a fragmented connection to 21st century Leb would have sufficed.

But it's likely my kids will always know my motherland from a place of deficit and trauma. They will not know it as it was. They will not inherit the nostalgia, no matter how imagined. That means they too are at a loss. Because to have Lebanon in their lives was to have it all.

But that Lebanon, my Lebanon, doesn't exist anymore. And so I sit here, weeping, yearning for another chance to sit on my grandfather's lap or see my son run through olive groves or have my daughter pick eggs from my grandmother's chicken coop.

If the tears wept and love felt for that country were enough to save it, it would be paradise, utopia, a nation among nations. But alas...in the words of the great Fairuz, men qalbi Salam Li Beirut