Epilogue – Lebanon

It took months for the Lebanese experiences to settle within me. Not because they were bad. Quite the opposite. It was one of my best journeys. Full of moments I still recall with a smile. Unexpected conversations, spontaneous detours, absurd solutions that somehow always worked. The kind of density that makes you feel: something real is happening.

And yet, it cannot simply be described as “fantastic” — and left at that.

Because there is another layer.

A few hundred meters from luxury hotels, crumbling infrastructure. Modern restaurants beside power outages. Carefully renovated spaces next to collapsing houses. Behind the Mediterranean ease, a quiet political tension — not dramatic, but present, like a constant low hum in the background.

This duality was something I had only sensed before departure — and then witnessed with my own eyes.

Lebanon does not allow for comfortable, sterile tourism. It is not a place where everything can be planned in advance and unfold exactly as the brochure promises. It requires flexibility. Acceptance. The understanding that reality is not a backdrop, but a living, sometimes fractured structure.

And yet, perhaps that is precisely why it lingers so strongly.

In the prologue, I wrote that I had no personal experience — only layered fragments. Films, news, half-sentences. A cautious, slightly hesitant curiosity. Back then, I was starting from absence.

Now I know: the absence did not disappear — it transformed.

Lebanon did not provide clear answers. It did not become a neat, easily summarized story. I cannot describe it solely in superlatives, but I cannot condemn it either. What I saw was a complex reality — one that both functions and fractures at the same time.

It was one of my best journeys.

And one of the hardest to tell.

Because there are places that cannot be measured in highlight moments, but in how long they continue to work within you afterward. Lebanon was like that. It did not end at the airport. It did not conclude with the final post. Months later, a scene, a street, a feeling still returns.

The prologue recorded where I began.

The epilogue records that I did not return to the same place.

And perhaps that is the true measure of a journey.