It is Important, Just to Be Writing

What am I doing here when I wanted to be out in the world? This is not the city I wanted to live in, didn't I want to grow an herb garden in my windowsill? At night, we lie (lay? Julia?) around and talk about the bodies we love, other bodies, (we never talk about loving our own, which doesn't mean we don't; I mostly do, it's just not the conversation we're having). We wash our underwear in the sink, rinse it in cold water in the shower, wring it out, and hang it from the curtain rings with clothespins. Last night I opened the bakery box of powdered-sugar cookies and found an ant wriggling under the doily. "Jessi!" I lamented into the living room. "Oh no," she said. She knew what I was talking about. Nothing is safe.

There is not much I can tell you about this city. I spent most of my days reading in my apartment, making tea, eating eggs, divining the internet from the sky. Other days, I take a sometimes two-hour bus ride out of the city into New Cairo to the American University in Cairo's new corporate-park-Disneyland campus in the desert, past gated communities and a huge cemetery and English-language billboards depicting happy white people and the Future University of Egypt. Mark Westmoreland wanted us to talk about New Cairo in terms of Benjamin's phantasmagoria last week but our conversation went astray, dry, we ran out of time, something. OH MY GOD, I can not handle being criticized but at the same time, I WAS NOT DISMISSING THOSE READINGS AS ABSTRACT OR IRRELEVANT. There, I said it. On the other hand, I wonder if I am smart enough. Smart, enough.

I wanted to be part of something bigger.

This morning in the shower I didn't wash my hair because it feels nice and glossy and I didn't want to lose it, that satiny feel, I stood under the stream of water so that it hit my chest and back instead and I thought I smelled something burning, a smell that followed me out of the shower into my bedroom. It is my hair, it smells like shisha smoke from Farah last night, I should have washed it. This morning in the shower, I reached up to adjust the shower head and with my arm outstretched, I kissed my tattoo, I was barely awake and it seemed like the right thing to do. I was naked but I am nevernaked now, or more naked than before, I made it part of me, it is part of something bigger.