Landings

October 19 @ 3.20am

I had a haircut before I left Damascus. There are eight salons on my street (note: my street is at best five blocks long). Most of the salons boast opaque glass walls, and just outside the door there's usually a rack with about a dozen towels hanging to dry. Rocco's uses only black towels; Ziad's got blue and yellow.

It was almost eight-thirty when I stepped out the door. I felt proud that I was going to the salon at night. It was a first.

Ziad remembered me. Stacked all throughout his place are containers of gel with Swedish Adonises gazing at you with distant allure. The speakers buzzed with the new Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson while Ziad began to straighten my hair. This happens in Beirut too. Before the cut begins--no, even before the pre-haircut discussion begins, the stylist gets to ironing out your hair with the scalding, concentrated heat of a blowdryer. Digging into your scalp with a cylindrical brush, he aims his incinerator at the brush and holds the heat just long enough so that it burns with a jolt.

I'm starving. I want to eat the fur coat on the Turkish woman in front of me.

After a brief layover in Istanbul, my flight lands mid-morning in Paris.

I landed in Paris just over a year ago from London. It was the final leg of my evacuation from Lebanon, and I remember pulling up to Porte Maillot in the Air France Bus and catching my mother standing in the shade. She was leaning slightly to her right, and her hands were entwined in the rope of her purse.

---Yikes: time to board the plane! STAMPEDE!!!