Before we understood where we stood on a map, we understood what was taken away.  Before we could spell sovereignty, we learned how to measure absence. We learned geography through subtraction. I did not grow up during a war. I grew up inside a count.

We learned to count losses long before we learned to count victories.
We counted the days not forward but between escalations, speeches and strikes.

Between the promise of restraint and the choreography of retaliation.

We count down without spectacle.
We count the hours the airport remains open.
We count flights the way other nations count holidays.
We count the price of bread, the price of gas, and the price of being Lebanese.

They tell us to count our blessings. So we audit them.  Four hours of electricity, one night without bombs, a morning in which the sky behaves like a sky and not a message.

We count to ten to master our anger while the war counts generations.  It counts the distance between what is said in our name and what is decided without us.  It counts us as figures in notifications, as margins in negotiations, as background in other people’s foregrounds.

Some of us learned early that we did not count, at least not strategically, not geopolitically, not sufficiently. So we set about proving that we count: in our work, in our art, in our departures. We counted degrees, currencies, and passports. We counted who left and who stayed, and we counted both as acts of courage.

We count sheep to fall asleep while drones count coordinates overhead.  We keep count of ceasefires the way archivists keep rare manuscripts... delicately, sceptically, aware that each one may be misprinted.

We count the years since “the last war,” a phrase that feels less like memory and more like a warning.  We count funerals with the scepticism of people who have learned that grief, too, can be turned into a headline.  We count the dwindling number of illusions we are willing to entertain.

We have been counted out so often that we developed a counter-instinct: to count ourselves in. Into conversations that exclude us... into futures that hesitate to claim us... into a history that prefers us as footnotes.

We count exits when we enter a room.
We count how many seconds the silence lasts after a loud sound.
We count how long it takes for anxiety to settle in the chest and pretend it is normal.

We count the friends who say, “It will pass.”  We count the ones who whisper, “It won’t.”  We count the names in our phones and wonder which ones will still be here next year.

We count birthdays between ceasefires.  We count parties between threats.

And still, there are things we refuse to count.
We do not count how many times we almost gave up.
We do not count how many times we packed and unpacked a bag.  We do not count how many times we said, “This is the last time.”

Because if we counted those, the number would break us.

So we count something else.

We count the mornings we wake up and choose to stay.

We count the jokes told in the dark.  The giggles after a glass too many. The new friends made at bars.
We count the stubborn plans made anyway.  We count the way a city cleans its own wounds and opens its shops the next day.

The war keeps its numbers, its tallies, its statements and its careful math. But we keep what cannot be measured.
We keep showing up, we keep loving loudly, we keep building as if stability is something we can earn from the ground itself.

History may keep its records,
its dates, its damage, its careful totals, but no math can ever capture the stubborn choice to wake up here and call it home.

We will keep choosing this place in the morning, even on the hard days.  We will keep loving without guarantees.  We will keep arguing as if tomorrow belongs to us.  We will keep planning for tomorrow despite the weather report's uncertainty in the spring.

The numbers do not get the last word.
The count is not finished.