The Things That Save You
fake Starbucks + real cats + truth + love
I’m sitting at an imitation Starbucks in the mountains with a cat named Candy.
Yes, this is Lebanon. Whatever they call rules here are usually vague suggestions, but I’m still amazed that no one says anything about having a cat at a coffee shop. Actually, they do. Half the employees have already come over and patted Candy. The guy sitting next to us has just invited his girlfriend over to meet her.
My friend Yara adopted Candy two days ago, and has been running all over the country ever since and didn’t want to leave her at home today. Yara is also the founder of Truth Be Told, the NGO I volunteered with during the height of the war. So she (Candy) is next to me now, in a carrier bag, while Yara and I get to work.
Only seven hours later than planned.
I wasn’t surprised when she called this morning to say she was running late. I’ve been in this part of the world long enough to have forgotten what it’s like for people to arrive when they say they will, or to apologize for not doing so. My Arabic teacher says that 15 minutes late in Lebanon is 45 minutes early. Also, she (Yara) was delivering medications to some of the families that Truth Be Told supports.
“I’ll meet you at 1:30,” she said. “2pm maximum.”
I had just left the house and had already gotten in the car, so I got onto the highway so I could make use of my time stuck in traffic figuring out what to do. The options were to drive into the city to pick up some medication my dad needed, or to go nearby where Yara and I were supposed to meet and see my friend Michel. I met Michel on a dating app (before I gave such things up in exchange for my sanity) and we went out for one dinner and decided halfway through (okay, before we sat down) that we should be friends. But, like, for real. Michel checks in on me and my dad almost every day (“How’s my man?”). He’s translated for me over speakerphone in the wee hours of the morning. And he has the most comfortable grey corduroy couch, and two matching grey cats, who could be Candy’s cousins.
Also, he calls me “bitch” as a term of endearment. I think he calls everyone that, but still, I love it.
I send Michel a voice note asking if I can come by.
“Bitch,” he writes back, “just tell me when you’re 10 minutes away.”
He greets me in front of his apartment wearing yellow crocs, and gives me a giant hug. We settle onto the couch, me on the L-shaped part and him in the middle, and work side by side in silence, music on the TV, sometimes focusing on our own thing, sometimes cooing over the cats, sometimes stopping to share recent dating stories. When I tell him about how I still need to get my dad’s medication, an hour’s round trip away, he calls his cousin who works in the city and arranges for him to pick it up and bring it back this way.
We have lunch.
We work some more.
Yara texts to say she’ll be done soon.
My body has now become one with the couch.
“I really want to sleep,” I say, from somewhere amongst the cushions, “but I’m Yara’s going to call as soon as I do.”
“Give her my number,” Michel instructs, and I do and pass out peacefully in a cloud of corduroy and rolled tobacco smoke and typing noises, punctuated by his giggles at a text from a girl he’s just told me about.
“Are you sure you slept okay?” he asks, when I open one eye. “You looked weird.”
It’s the best sleep I’ve had in months, and now I have a headache. I ask him for a Panadol, and he shoves a whole sleeve of it at me (“Bitch, take some for your purse”), and adds that Yara will meet me at the fake Starbucks in 20 minutes.
I hug him again and drive over.
I’m getting a table outside when Yara swooshes in, a flurry of bags and apologies. She orders her favourite sandwich and has it cut in two so I can have half. During the height of the war, as she spearheaded the feeding, housing and medication of thousands of displaced people, often working until 2 or 3am—even when her previous cat suddenly died—I never once saw her not making sure that everyone around her was fed, hydrated, and had snacks for later. She’s always giving me little gifts, too. A Kohl you can only find in one store in Beirut. A leather hair tie. A crossbody phone strap.
Maybe gifts and feeding people are the Lebanese love language.
It’s definitely not being on time.
Over the last couple of months, Yara and I been working towards the next step of Truth Be Told: a physical community space where people can come together, share stories and food, and understand that we need to be in this whole mess together, rather than fighting and blaming each other, which is what the people in charge want us to be doing. It’s a dream we both had independently before meeting, and once we started making it happen, strange things started to occur.
At a going away party a couple of weeks ago, my friend’s partner told me he launches restaurants for a living. He and his boss have offered to help.
Another friend let it drop that her family has a building for rent in the exact location we want to set up. If we can raise enough money in time, it’s ours.
And on a group chat I rarely check, someone posted a link for an amazing grant. It wouldn’t fund everything we want to do, but it would be a huge help. This is why we’re meeting today: to submit the first part of it.
It’s due at midnight.
The sun is now setting.
We open our laptops. There’s a little clock in the corner of the website showing how many hours and minutes we have left until the deadline, although I keep expecting it to say, “But hey, NBD if you’re running late!” We write and rewrite, reading things out loud across the table, debating budget lines, interrupting each other to shorten word counts. We check on Candy, who’s snoozing happily in her bag. Michel’s cousin comes by with my dad’s medication. The power goes out, and comes back on. It smells like freshly baked cinnamon buns, which might be the thing from Canada I miss the most (aside from friends and family, I mean, obviously), and I’m so hungry, but we know without saying so that we can’t stop for carbs or we’ll never start again.
Three hours later, we stand up, point my laptop north on the table for good luck, and get ready to submit.
Suddenly, Yara grabs my hand.
“Natalie,” she says. “No matter if we get this money or not, let’s promise we are going make this thing happen.”
I squeeze her fingers, and with a confidence I still don’t fully understand, say,
“Of course we are.”
I hit the button.
A red error message flashes on the screen.
Yara swears in Arabic, which I’ve never heard her do, and we lean over the table, punching the keys and re-entering stuff in the same but different ways.
“Maybe it’s because everyone is on the site at the same time?”
“Maybe we need to enter the date in the middle of January instead of the end?”
Desperately, I stab the button again.
You have successfully submitted, it tells us.
We sigh and high five.
It’s fully dark now. We get in our cars and I drive slowly along the curving roads back to my dad’s, hoping there’s still dinner left. Suddenly, I see a call from Yara come up on my screen. I freeze, thinking that someone has contacted her to say that there’s an error in our submission. We’re both still in the mountains (and this is Lebanon), so the call comes through like she’s under water, then disconnects entirely.
She sends a voice note a minute later.
“Girl,” she says, laughing. “I was trying to say thank you for believing in Truth Be Told!”
Too hungry and tired to edit myself, I voice note her back. I say that I believe in Truth Be Told because I believe in her. And how much it’s meant to me to be able to work on this project. I say how through everything that’s happened over the last few months—my dad getting sick, my career being replaced by AI, living in a country which chews you up, spits you out and then lures you back in and is also the only place I’ve ever felt like I come from— on top of the baseline of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and climate disasters, being part of this thing she started has probably saved me.
She sends back teary emojis and lots of hearts.
Then Michel texts, asking if I’m coming back to his place after I’m done.
“Bitch,” I say, “I’d be monosyllabic.”
“Okay,” he says. “Where are you? Home?”
Yes, I tell him.
I’m home.
You—the readers of this substack—collectively raised $10K US during the height of the war here, for Truth Be Told and other community kitchens in Beirut.
If you’d like to continue supporting us, you can do so using the button below. We take no admin fees, so 100% of TBT donations go towards food, medications and supplies for displaced people in Lebanon.
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I could have read another hundred pages of this.
Ok I finished reading the whole thing and I'm trying not to cry. You're a real one, Natalie. Love from Canada.