Week 5, 2026: Between two cities
Much like running, legs go numb and curses go quiet ten minutes into riding a motorbike without a helmet. The guy driving me was wearing a helmet, though, and asked for permission to go a little faster, and both of these things comforted me. Much of the start of the week had gone to picking at emotional scabs, permeated by platefuls of kofta bil tahina and episodic breaks of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. So I was grateful for the ride, grateful to be out of my pajamas with no real destination in mind. That’s the best place to be.
I was not too far from Zawya Cinema and a screening of Yunan (2025) was starting in an hour. You think you’re too old to be surprised by how a cinema works until you get handed a ticket with no assigned seating. I sat on the third aisle and everybody else sat behind me. It was a near-perfect film about exile. I wept so much I was convinced somebody would ask me to stop. By the time Georges Khabbaz was reciting that beautiful poem at the end, I was spent. He said: You will be forgotten, as though you never set foot on this earth, as though your steps left no trace, as though your heart never beat, as though you never owned anything at all. You will be forgotten, as though you never were.
That’s why it can be harder to leave a person than a place. I remember everything but I wanted to hear you tell stories anyway. I wish you did. It's not the same when I have to ask. I never had much faith in being remembered by land. And it’s only human to want to live forever.
I walked around until I got the better of the sniffles and I could go into Abu Tarek and coherently mutter ‘one forty-five to go please’ to the guy at the till and then pay forty-five for the smallest box of koshary. And that was my first successful solo day in Cairo.
Not long after the Friday prayer, H was waiting for us outside our building in his sunglasses. We were meant to take the train to Alexandria but H couldn’t find enough return tickets. He orchestrated the whole thing, got the Nissan fueled up and booked a flat we hadn’t seen. I was nervous about the flat because H went to book another one and the owner said it wasn’t available and then they agreed off the record for us to stay at this flat instead. We listened to a lot of rap on the way and I finished my book.
I’m currently going through a stack of books that my father bought me years ago that have been collecting dust in my teenage bedroom. This was the fifteenth book. I think I have just under ten to go? I’ve had to put my pink Kobo aside in the meantime and I miss it so much.
The flat was spacious. It looked like somebody still lived there, half-full trash can, coins and baby pictures scattered around, half a roll of toilet paper. I felt a little uneasy, probably because I wasn’t involved in choosing the flat. The empty fridge and vacant wardrobes offered some comfort at least.
It was already 4pm. We ordered a car to some sort of important Alexandrian castle. The lift was taking a long time, so H decided to race us down the stairs. Except he took the key with him and the lift doesn’t work without it. And that’s how the three of us ended up sprinting down twelve flights of stairs. Gosh I’m so unfit. It’s humiliating how much takeout I’ve consumed here.
Fish! Taxidermy, aquarium, seafood dinner. We got down and dirty with marine life, and ate well of mullet fish and shrimp and calamari. And then washed it down with mint tea on plastic chairs facing the Mediterranean. I feel so comfortable around them; the funny comes easy and time goes easy. One thing my friends often learn about me on trips is that I'm comfortable with silence. If I have nothing to say, I don't say anything. I can't decide if I want to like it or want to change it.
On the car ride home, H told the driver that we’re tourists and asked for recommendations for tomorrow. They chatted the whole way home, all thirty minutes. The driver kept saying ‘You Cairo people’ and it felt nice to belong somewhere, even if it wasn’t true.
It’s not true. If I were a Cairo person, my notes wouldn’t say: Jealous of men. Jealous of being able to sit in the passenger seat without it looking flirtatious. Jealous of being able to strike up a friendship with a driver without him thinking you want to screw him. Jealous of being able to say ‘what should I check out in Alexandria, boss?’ and the answer not being ‘my apartment’.
It’s not true. I’ve had plenty of nice conversations with drivers. But the overcorrection warps the brain after weeks of being misunderstood and soon I find myself wishing I could just be home. But where the fuck is that?
After our long day out, I took a hot shower and we turned off all the ugly overhead lights and got comfy on the L-shaped couch. We binged stand-ups, SNL monologues, Da7ee7 videos. When I put on Hussein Kaouk’s stand-up special, we laughed until we cried. H turned to me at some point and said ‘I bet I can bench you’. I laughed and he said ‘let me prove it’. So I let him prove it and he benched me a bunch of times. And thank god for that because if he had failed, I would’ve called it a night.
Around 2am, the crowd dispersed. Medo went to sleep and H went out for a walk. He came back all wide-eyed and excited and said the streets looked perfectly cruiseable. In Tavi Gevinson’s Fan Fiction zine, Taylor Swift tells her to play Pictures of You by the Cure if she ever wants a date to feel like a movie. The closest this cruise down Alexandria’s 3am streets felt to a movie was when Mary On A Cross by Ghost was playing.
Back on the L-shaped couch, we had a smoke and a chat. It was pushing 6am when H said we should probably catch some sleep. While waiting for the boys to get ready in the morning, I went for a walk around the block and called my parents. On my way up, I noticed the Nissan was clamped. H said Medo and I could kick off the touristy rounds while he called the police. I left my book behind in the flat, as more proof of life.
The bibliothèque, Roman theatre, Greco-Roman museum. Check, check, check. It’s no wonder the city has produced great thinkers and artists. Alexandria makes sense as a story of how a city can make a kind of person.
Before heading back to Cairo, H insisted we try Alexandrian hawawshi. I slept in the back of the unclamped Nissan while he queued for the sandwiches, then we used his trunk as a table. One of the best things I’ve had in Egypt.
I've had such a wonderful time here.