Silo

August 4th, 2025, mankind is five months into the fifth year of quarantine. First-world countries have managed to control the spreading of the novel COVID-19 virus as the rest of the world continues to struggle. Halfway into 2021, the glimmer of hope pharmaceutical companies had promised has faded, and the virus kept mutating making the idea of an efficacious vaccine a mere dream, a pleasant thought perhaps.

August 4th, 2025 was not an ordinary day for the Lebanese people, it was the day 200 tons of contaminated Ammonium Nitrate (NH4NO3) blew up the silo in the Port of Beirut flattening the country. The shockwave made its way to Cyprus and the borders of Syria ripping apart anything that was unfortunate enough to have been there that day. Silence....followed by the screams of the wounded and the sorrow of those who had fled Lebanon during the civil war back in 1975. This was the start of the fall of the cedar. The buddhists have always preached that life is suffering, however it is our suffering that gives us meaning and reason. It is how we make ourselves resourceful for the people around us in times of grief, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson says. The question remains; how much suffering can one take before collapsing into a blackhole that sucks in and destroys everything in its way? A collapse so strong where light has no escape.

The United Nations (UN) declared the event an emergency that demanded international intervention. With no survivors in sight and fully occupied Intensive Care Units (ICUs), international troops were deployed to conduct a thorough search for survivors amongst the rubble. Joseph, a volunteer of Lebanese descent, decided he wanted in on the search for survivors. It was a chance for him to connect with his roots for once and see for himself what his family had left behind when they immigrated to Brazil during the civil war. Joseph and his team were assigned the Gemayzeh area, a historic part of Beirut that once radiated with the souls of the Lebanese youth; it was their sanctuary, a breather from the daily struggles of your common Lebanese layman. Gemayzeh was also home to the older Lebanese generation who refused to leave their homes even in the most brutal of wars. As resilient as the people of Gemayzeh were, their fragile bodies fell to the ground like petals. They refused to bow, but malevolence was stronger that day, it tore their hearts before it could tear their skin.

As Joseph walked down the scarred street, he couldn't help but notice a house whose foundation somehow withstood the shock. It looked like it had untold stories of Beirut, all its secrets, whispers of the by-passers and the sound of their tipsy laughs on a Saturday night. He walked closer. The cracks in its walls were as deep as the wrinkles of whoever lived under its roof. In the midst of the chaos, the living room still had the aroma of morning coffee, it made him smile for a second. He carefully roamed the house looking for signs of life, but just when he was about to leave the bedroom, he stumbled upon a wrecked chandelier and fell to the ground close to the bed. His eyes landed on an envelope that looked rather thick for a love letter. After brushing the dust off of it, Joseph hesitated to open the envelope, it was none of his business knowing what's in there but at the same time it could contain information about the residence of this house, something he needs to document as part of the excavation process. Joseph decided to take the route that aligns with his mission; he opened it. It was money, $20,000 of it. The amount left him speechless, but that was not the entire story. The envelope had a note that said "if found, return to Robin...". Joseph was intrigued, he scrutinized every drawer, every shelf, and every cupboard he could find to unveil the identity of Robin. As he was leaving the house a defeated man, a rocking chair that was facing the window overlooking the garden caught his eye. He had already lost hope of finding anything useful, but he wanted to see the street from the perspective of whoever lived there one more time.

It was there, what he could've been looking for all along. A black notebook sat on the chair collecting dust from the blast. As Joseph opened the notebook, a bookmark with a Cedar tree fell to the ground from the first page. "Schizophrenia: Day 1, My name is Antoine Khabbaz, I feel detached from reality, but my symptoms are manageable...", "Schizophrenia: Day 224, I am seeing and hearing things that I can still distinguish as unreal....", "Schizophrenia: Day 1024, Robin is a great friend to have, she keeps me company and never leaves my side...", as Joseph flipped through the pages the writing got sloppier, his eyes watered up, and he now understood. Robin never existed, she was a symptom of Antoine's Schizophrenia. Antoine took it upon himself to document his disorder to keep himself in check, but he couldn't keep up, his loneliness fed the disorder. When the blast happened, the trauma pulled Antoine deeper into derealization, a common symptom of Schizophrenia, and he wrote the note inside the envelope before fleeing the house to the streets. Desperate and overwhelmed, Joseph ran to the streets shouting for Antoine with tears running down his face. The emotional magnitude of reality was too much, the world got dark, Joseph slowly fainted.

After six months in intensive care, Antoine woke up from his coma, the chandelier in the bedroom had caused major damage to his brain when it dropped. Antoine had been reliving the trauma of the blast in his sleep over and over. There was no excavation team and there was no volunteer, but there was Joseph. Antoine couldn't make it to the phone in time when the blast happened, his last memory of Joseph was not knowing whether he was dead or alive. He wanted to tell his son that he was okay. His trauma and fear manifested into what he saw in the coma, the rubble, the screams, desperate Joseph, and most importantly, Robin. Robin was his late wife who had passed away in 2020 after contriving the virus on her flight back from Minneapolis to see Joseph. $20,000 was not what Antoine had saved in his lifetime, it was the cost of keeping Robin on a ventilator in the midst of her sickness. He couldn't live with the guilt of what his humble career as an avant garde artist in Lebanon couldn't provide, it followed him, even in his coma.

Antoine suffered complications that night and passed away. Joseph went back to the house in Gemayzeh to gather his late father's belongings, amongst them was the notebook on the rocking chair. He opened the notebook one last time, the bookmark slipped, "Dear Robin, it is the first night since you've been away, a Cedar shall fall until I see you again, Love, Antoine".