I’m here now

I’m Here Now

“Enti mineen?”

Where are you from?

This may be the single most frequently asked question I’ve received in all my years living in Egypt. (Second up, “ Andik Gawazz”  You are married?

Depending on the day, the person asking, and how much explaining I feel like doing, the answer has varied.

These days I’ve started saying:

“I’m here now.”

This doesn’t entirely satisfy anyone because they can very clearly see that I am not from the West Bank of Luxor.

“Since when?”

About a week now, and 2-3 times a year for the past 5 years…

Sometimes I give them the slightly longer version: I had a big explosion in Cairo and needed to come to Saeed for some peace.

Everyone here seems to understand this pretty easily.

No further explanation required.

Many people from Upper Egypt  can tell you EXACTLY how many times they have been to Cairo and what a jarring experience it had been.

Personally, I’m used to contrast. My life has been full of it. I’ve now lived in different countries, my work submerses me into different subcultures, between wildly different environments and communities, and I spent a lot of my adult life traveling through my work. Dropping myself somewhere and figuring out how to exist there is not particularly new territory for me.

But Cairo did something to my sense of scale.

After living there for 5 years, even cities like Berlin, Stockholm, or  Vancouver don’t feel particularly big to me anymore. Cairo has a ridiculous amount of everything. Restaurants. Shisha bars. Banks. Delivery. People. Traffic. Noise. Food at any hour. Whatever you need and a hundred versions of whatever you don’t need.

So as I was preparing to leave New Cairo, I had moments of looking around and thinking:

What the fuck are you doing?

I was voluntarily leaving all of this to move to a place where my road isn’t even paved.

You don’t even have Talabat.

I came down by van with my things instead of flying. And as we made the long descent into Upper Egypt, something strange was happening.

My mind was going fucking crazy.

My body was relaxing.

The farther south we went, the more I could feel it.

Of course, moving somewhere for peace doesn’t mean you immediately experience any peace. You still arrive with all your shit. Literally and figuratively.

I’ve spent my first week furnishing an apartment, finding things, organizing things, figuring out how things work, trying to get enough of a life assembled around myself that I can start working again.

I came here to get out of my head.

Unfortunately, I brought my head with me.

This morning I finally got out early enough to take a proper walk before the sun got too hot.

I walked down the West Bank Corniche.

When I was here in April, parts of it were still being built. Now there are about five kilometers stretching along the Nile. The West Bank itself is still rugged. Dirt roads, farms, animals, little shops, homes, unfinished buildings — and then this beautiful new Corniche running alongside the river.

I walked all the way to the end.

And I sat down.

For the first time since arriving, I think I actually stopped.

I looked at some horses grazing freely in how fucking beautiful it was.

And I wept.

I thought about my mom. And wept more. 

I had always wanted to bring her here.

The view from the end of the Corniche

There are so many things about what has happened with my mother that I don’t know how to write yet. But sitting there that morning, the thought was very simple.

I would have loved to show her this.

And I couldn’t.

So I sat at the end of the Corniche and cried.

I finished crying and got up to walk home as the sun started getting hot. 

This is Egypt. It can be extremely difficult to have a private existential crisis in a public place.

I’m actually very good at ignoring people at this point. Particularly around tourist areas, where an innocent “hello” can somehow result in you standing inside someone’s perfume shop five minutes later wondering how the fuck you got there.

So I mostly ignored everyone.

But then there was an older man who said good morning, when i answered back good morning he continued with Akbaraik eh? How's it going?

And as I opened my mouth to answer I started weeping again-  He said oh no girl, its ok its ok…..and he invited me to come sit and have tea with him.

Normally, I probably wouldn’t have gone.

But something about him felt different.

So I went.

His home was just down off the Corniche.

And when I say his home, I mean a very small stone home beneath a tree, largely outside. There was a simple Upper Egyptian-style couch close to the ground and the earth around it had been carefully swept.

And I mean clean.

Cleaner than any of my parents’ homes. (I have so much to say on hoarding.)

There was such care in it.

He apologized to me.

“I live very simple.”

And suddenly I felt a little embarrassed accepting anything from him.

He had invited me into this tiny place and was offering me tea. As hysterical weeping woman early on the corniche. He shared some soaked  dates with me.

“No,” I told him. “It’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with me. I really needed it today.”

And I really did.

We talked with my broken Arabic and his broken English, somehow filling in the rest.

He told me he had never gone to school.

He was brilliant.

He had lived in this area for around forty years. His family was from there too, generations before him.

And now, around his little patch of swept earth beneath the Acacia trees, the West Bank is changing.

He was brilliant.

He had lived in this area for around forty years. His family was from there too, generations before him.

And now, around his little patch of swept earth beneath the Acacia trees, the West Bank is changing.

The new Corniche is part of that change. Hotels are being built. Roads are changing. Development is moving farther along the Nile, slowly smoothing out some of the ruggedness that makes the West Bank what it is — and, inevitably, making it more palatable and accessible to the foreign eye.

I asked him what he was going to do when all of that development eventually reached his home.

He wasn’t particularly concerned.

Wait and see.

Lessa, lessa- he said .

He still has time.

I found that remarkable.

I had just relocated hundreds of kilometers while my brain ran endless calculations about what might happen next in my life.

This man was sitting in a home that could quite literally have development moving toward it and seemed considerably less interested in predicting the future than I was.

At some point during our conversation, he looked at me.

He pointed toward his head.

“Enti hena.”

You’re here.

I laughed.

Yeah.

I know.

I am very fucking hena.

Then he pointed down toward the earth.

Here.

Not here.

Here.

I needed to get out of my head and onto the ground.

This man had known me for less than an hour.

I spend a substantial part of my professional life working with bodies, movement and embodiment, and apparently I had traveled all the way to Upper Egypt to have an old man living beneath a tree point out the fairly obvious fact that I was not currently inhabiting mine.

Fair enough.

Before I left, he reached up and picked a little puff of cotton from one of his trees and gave it to me.

He told me he had planted that tree fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years.

He had his trees, his swept earth, his little stone home, his dates.

And time.

I thanked him and started walking back toward my new home.

On the way, I stopped at a shop.

I saw some extra-high-caffeine Coca-Cola I’d never seen before, so naturally I needed to investigate that. I bought one, a Fanta, and a bunch of other shit without really thinking about what I was spending.

Then I thought about the man I had just left.

I probably spent more casually in that shop than he spends on many things he actually needs in an entire month.

And yet he had been the one giving things to me.

I don’t want to romanticize poverty or simplicity. I don’t know what his life feels like from inside of it. I don’t know his hardships. Having fewer possessions doesn’t automatically make somebody more peaceful, more spiritual or more wise.

That would be far too easy a story.

I only know what I actually saw.

His earth was swept clean.

He welcomed me into his home.

He apologized because it was simple.

He shared what he had.

He gave me a cotton puff from a tree he planted fifteen years ago.

And somehow, through my broken Arabic and his broken English, he saw immediately what I had apparently been having considerable difficulty seeing myself.

Enti hena.

I’ve been very much hena lately.

Maybe that’s part of why I came south.

I don’t know what I’m doing here yet.

I don’t know how long this chapter is going to be. I don’t know exactly what my life is going to look like when the dust settles from everything that brought me here.

For once, maybe I don’t need to.

I’m here now.

And maybe the next part is simply learning how to actually be here.