The unraveling of suppressed emotions in an unexpected place
Somewhere over Serbia, at 38,000 feet in the air, I allowed myself to cry.
On the flight to France, on my way to cook at events I have been planning since February, I had brought with me a book I saw on Emiko Davies’ Substack; How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K Fisher. This book was published in 1942 as a lifestyle advice for people going through the scarcities that come as a consequence of reckless wars.
Before even going into the chapters of the book, I was already caught up in my emotions. I was still in the introduction of the revised edition (1952) and it hit me really hard. In the past six years, we went through a devastating economic crash, a global pandemic with a suspicious lockdown, shortages in anything imported (Lebanon imports most of the goods or raw materials for food and non-food industries), literal blackouts on top of the usual power cuts, a destroyed port, bombings, ethnic cleansing, invasion, and occupation. Some of these were labeled as a “war” by the media, but looking at all of this from afar, it has been nothing but a continuous nonstop war.
