The warm air greeted me as I walked out the door of our building and onto our street in my boots, jacket and new turquoise earrings. I was out alone, no baby, no husband, just me, walking the evening streets of Geneva on the way to sit in a restaurant and have dinner with a friend. I sat in my favourite seat on the bus and people watched.
Evenings like this are priceless to me now, and I feel all new inside, like I live in a new city, that this is a new world, like everything is different.
I walk on the small sidewalk to Les Nomandes and pass the post-work crowd who gesture wildly with wine glasses in hand. I hear whispers about Tehran, giggles about co-workers and I still wonder to myself how I live in this place so full of people so full of their own self importance who are out to change the world but who are able to do so little.
My friend and I sit in this Moroccan Lebanese restaurant full of tasty food, a rarity in Geneva, and I glance through the menu and make my choice. The food took a while, but when it arrives, I can’t wait to eat my veal kabobs and enjoy the mezze platter of hummus, baba ghanoush, pickled beats, tabouleh and so many other tasty bites. One bit of the veal tells me that I am having a cultural moment – those moments show up at the worst possible times – because I definitely ordered a kebob of veal kidneys. And now I am asking myself why I did not ask what the word rognon meant.
This moment feels descriptive of the last two years of my life – no matter how hard I have tried for even the veneer of perfection, something inevitably goes wrong. My hands gripped tightly the part that kept circling the wrong, wrong, wrong, but the slow process of letting go allows for more laughter, life and love.
So last night I ate my hummus and baba ghanoush with gusto and thanked God for a kind friend who gave me one of her chicken sesame skewers.