From across the border, a reflection on a neighbour learning to live in a permanent in between.
Tripoli has learned to live suspended. After more than a decade without a single functioning government, the city carries on with a kind of weary competence: businesses open, weddings happen, the traffic snarls, and everyone keeps one eye on the news from the oil fields.
This spring brought a rare flicker of progress, a unified budget agreed with foreign help, and then, almost on cue, fighting that shut a refinery and reminded everyone how thin the calm is. Libyans have seen too many false dawns to celebrate early.
What strikes a visitor is the patience, and the exhaustion beneath it. People want, more than any faction or foreign plan, simply for the in between to end. For Tunisia, watching a neighbour endure this teaches a hard lesson about how long the unfinished can last
