I am sitting in a friend’s tiny Manhattan apartment. It is sweltering. On a table in front of me are the bare essentials for the journey I am about to take: a US passport, freshly stamped with a Syrian visa; a Lebanese residency permit; a New York-Paris-Beirut plane ticket, recently amended with a diversion to Damascus; a stack of cash to pay for a taxi ride from Damascus to Beirut that usually costs a fraction of what it does now; two identical, hopelessly low-grade Nokia mobile phones; and a long list of telephone numbers to cover every possible contingency.

For three and a half years I have lived in Beirut, where I am the arts and culture editor of The Daily Star, an English-language newspaper based in Lebanon and distributed throughout the Middle East.

I visited Lebanon for the first time in the summer of 2002, fuelled by the same curiosity that takes hold of many members of second, third, and fourth-generation immigrant families in America (my paternal grandmother is Lebanese). Six months later, I decided to move to Beirut.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound — given the dominant Western image of Beirut as a city pulverised by 15 years of civil war — I moved to Beirut to write about contemporary art. After six years of editing magazines in New York, I was ready for a change. I wanted to pinpoint that ever-elusive intersection between art and politics and I felt I had found it in Beirut. I encountered a generation of artists, filmmakers, writers, architects, designers, and musicians there who were all using their work to explore the causes and consequences of Lebanon’s recent, often violent, political history. I was struck by their social criticism and innovation. I was impressed by their courage.

Lebanon has no official infrastructure for contemporary culture — no modern art museum, no opera house, no public theatre — yet it boasts a wickedly cosmopolitan streak. In the 15 years since the civil war ended, Beirut’s young artists have built a vibrant art scene out of sheer will. These talented individuals — politically independent, notably secular, intellectually and aesthetically searching — are, I am sure, Lebanon’s best hope for a brighter future: or they were, because in a matter of days, as Lebanon was thrust back into war, that scene was destroyed.

I flew out of Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport at 2am on July 13. Just four hours later, Israeli warplanes bombed the runways and the war began. True, there had been trouble in the south a day earlier, starting when Hezbollah made the colossally stupid decision to violate Israel’s northern border and kidnap two Israeli soldiers as bait for a prisoner swap.

Before I left the newspaper on the night of July 12, I asked my associate publisher, Hanna Anbar: “Do you think I should be worried about flying through falling bombs?” I was joking. Anbar laughed. “Habibti,” he said — using a common diminutive for “sweetheart” — “You’ll be fine. It’s not the airport I’m worried about, it’s the power stations.” It wasn’t until I arrived in New York that I learned what had happened.

For three weeks, I watched the news in horror as Israeli warplanes laid waste to the city I had made my home, spurred on by Hezbollah’s reckless provocations. I realised I was lucky: unlike many of my Lebanese friends and colleagues, I could pick up where I’d left off in New York. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of ditching my job, my apartment, my boyfriend or my friends. I couldn’t accept the idea of losing Beirut. Slowly, I made the decision to return, and I set about obsessing over the details of what would be a rather intricate and uncertain journey.

Now, I am about to leave. Despite my best efforts I am imagining my own death. The Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria has been bombed three times in three days. Every time I plot another route, I wake up the next morning, check the news and learn that some stretch of it has been destroyed. Lebanon is being sealed off tighter and tighter each day.

Still, there is a way. My friends and family think that my plan is insane, but they are doing their best to be supportive. To an extent they understand. Anyway, they know I am stubborn, so they are not all that surprised. Just worried.

Paris: 12pm, Friday, August 4

Much to my surprise Lysandra Ohstrom, a newspaper colleague, joins me for the journey. The US embassy evacuated her from Lebanon a week ago. It was a three-day fiasco. Midway through, she says she realised she had made a mistake. She too, for her own reasons, is going back to Beirut. As a compromise to her parents’ concern, she is now saddled with a huge bag holding a flak jacket and a satellite phone. We joke morbidly about how the phone, which requires a clear horizon line to function, will never work in congested, urban Beirut. The flak jacket will do little in the face of bunker-busting bombs.