Laila

so it all started one day when i realized i had no roommates and a crappy apartment. i had less than a week to find someone i could maybe tolerate, and perhaps, be able to share this (crappy) apartment with. after the year i'd just had, i was suspicious of anyone and everyone, as my ex-roommates were psycho-borderline-depressed and i probably was too, so that horrible apartment witnessed neurotic barbarism all year round. what to do what to do.

and that one day, balancing on the wall outside the medical building in aub, i spot laila (then known as leila).
i thought, hmmmm, then hmmmm, what the hell, i don't know her very well but she has a good sense of humor and seems 'normal'. so we became roommates in a tiny infested apartment surrounded by cabarets from all sides and where the cleaning lady turned into a call girl at night. and that year, that year was one of the craziest years i've ever had, and she's ever had, and since we both discovered we were psychos while the world went on, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
she was finishing her master's while i was starting my clinical rotations and were both juggling more than we could handle, career-wise or love-wise. but i'd come home from the hospital, she'd be back from her cells (living or otherwise..) and we'd sit around the chipped table, change the channel manually on our tiny retarded tv and watch comedy after comedy. and oh my god laugh so hard my bellybutton was going to pop. and hence started the laughter in that apartment. sure we had crying spells shouting spells (with respective BF's) but the laughter was always there. laila, for anyone who does not know her, is so funny! her eyes twinkle, her mouth thins and lifts, and it's always as though she's swallowing the laugh and is ready to come out with it at the right time.
"aspect!" and fits of laughter at geek doctors or mad scientists, or at ourselves. and no matter what we did the apartment was still ugly and looked like a cheap motel. we introduced the hot pink 'lithotomy' chair but we only sat on the (i think they were beige) torn leather couch with cushions clearly made for some other couch.

laila would wake me up in the mornings, occasionally we exchanged coats, and we'd trudge to work. i look back at this year and rememember days which could have been so painful and sad, but somehow, were not. she was there for me, and still is, this little capricious girl from the north who is wise beyond her years and more caring than anyone i've met. she turns situations and outsmarts her enemies, and man, no matter what she says, it's always cool. we were cool. and nuts. panic attacks, step 1 and dying cells be damned, smuggler's inn would drown our sorrows. and our obssessions. and blue note jazz.
trivial pursuit and dinner at piazza. and the villages. we'd say the reason we clicked was that we were both simple village girls at heart, and start mouthing koura and beit-chabeb jargon. and then the year ended and laila left to MTL and i moved to a nicer apartment, by myself. but before she moved into her canadian studio, we made sure to buy her a lithotomy chair, in hot pink, to remind her of the good old crazy days at WH, where what happenned will mostly stay, there.