Rooftop: A postcard

They're not like rooftops at home. Not gabled, nor tiled, nor lined with mucky gutters. (Hardly clean, though, either.) In a sense, they're not rooftops at all. But that's certainly what they call them: flat little concrete spaces of no more than ten square metres, situated more or less on the rooftops of building -- no matter the ilk of activity within (residential/industrial/commercial/whatever). Just always, always the rooftops. Sometimes they'll jut out to the side, like porches. Sometimes they'll take the form of little corner pockets atop the building proper. But always they look and feel and function the same: to buy time, to fall away, to relax in a way very deep. What the 'serious travellers' tend to forget is that we're all on holiday, which means let's just relax a little, people. Take a moment. Thereupon you'll find a little plastic stool (sometimes a couple, never a bunch), an ash tray, most likely some wet-but-drying clothes flung sloppily over the banister. And from up here, this is what the viewpoint permits: an elevated view of a thousands-year-old city. Not quite a bird's eye-view, not completely removed, but high enough to be unruffled by it all, to be a little bit freer, to somehow be out of it and of it at once. The horns of the madly-scrambling cars below, usually a wicked-ugly cacophony, muted to a soft, care-not drone. The pollution defeated by the high-sailing winds. Heat thoroughly neutralised. You cross your legs, look around, take a sip of your drink. Notice the Lego-land of other buildings, all stained dirty on their perimeters due to their simply being here, absorbing the hardscrabble desert elements, doing the hard necessary work of sustaining generations of Arab families -- their businesses, their livelihoods. All the satellite dishes crooked comically in the same direction, at least five to a roof, receiving their TV nourishment like plants receiving the sun. Wave to your fellow rooftop-ers, flash them a smile and hope they see it. They don't wave back, probably too distant to see you. Oh well. You at least have this rooftop to yourself. It's lonely, but in a nice way. Wait, they're everywhere. Little specks of colour against the suicidal greywash of buildings. Other people. Someone's waving at you. Wave back. Offer your arms up in a gesture meaning 'ahhhhhh,' and watch them mirror you back. On their rooftop, separate from yours. The same type of rooftop, everywhere. Looking around in the dusky glow, you realise the likely reams of them, the sheer numbers. Hundreds of rooftop-ers in your eyeline alone. Imagine how many throughout Syria. Thousands. Imagine Turkey. Tens of thousands. Imagine Lebanon, Saudi, Iraq, Qatar. Hundreds of thousands, millions. Even Israel, many thousands of Jews taking a much-needed pause from their magnificent, ordinary, Promised-Land existence. All through the Middle East, across the many different time-zones, desert-hardened people getting high and soft and legless on rooftops, everyone the same. Looking around. Taking a moment. Finding their place. Find your place. Put away your guidebook, your notepad, your thick historical novel. All that. Put it down. Sit. Here is a postcard.