The Future

I accidentally erased the following paragraph in a moment of grappling days after I first wrote this entry and so I have to reconstruct it from memory so as not to censor the past. It was something like, "I am always surprised (or maybe I said embarrassed) by what happens to my face when I am singing. Which parts of what happens to my face are involuntary, and which parts happen because I know I am singing in front of someone (or here, singing in front of a camera)?" Something like that.

Last night I took a falluca boat ride on the Nile with some people I had never met before yesterday, except for the girl who invited me to come, who I met my first week here. Actually, we were a group of people who did not know each other previous to this night. Everyone knew one or two other people who knew one or two other people and so on; together we formed a circle, rather than a web, of relationships. There were some other graduate students from the University, some people in the Arabic Language Institute, and a journalist with Reuters who made sure to tell us in our first hour together that he went to Princeton and the Kennedy School. There were also two Egyptian boys with us who got the driver of the boat drunk on whiskey. We three talked together for most of the ride. The driver told us after he had three whiskeys that he had never drank before in his life and starting dancing on the edge of the boat. One of the boys, Kareem, is really interested in the American presidential election and wanted to know who I am voting for and who I think will win. I told him that I forgot to register for an absentee ballot.

Afterwards, we went in two cabs to Hureya in Midan Falaki. It is a bar from the British colonial era with mirrored walls and peeling yellow paint and small tables and chairs arranged in informal clusters. "Everyone who does not fit in comes here," Kareem told me. ("Hureya" is the word for "freedom" in Arabic.) There were a lot of older Egyptian men drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and talking seriously, younger Egyptian men drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and talking animatedly, sometimes with young Egyptian women, and tables of young and middle-aged American and European expats sitting with their Egyptian friends. The manager found enough chairs for all of us (there were six in the first wave but more showed up later) and opened beers and brought us a few ashtrays. He kissed the boys' cheeks and said something about me being beautiful over my shoulder that was not translated for me. Kareem said, "You can ash on the floor here. You can spit on the floor!" After awhile Ambereen and I decided to try to find a cab in the Eid foot traffic to take us back to Zamalek. Three cabs stopped before one would agree, and then we sat in traffic for ten minutes before we decided to get out and try to find one closer to the October bridge. Some night I would like to walk over it.

I was looking around the bar last night and Kareem was telling me about how he sometimes saw his University professors drinking there at lunch time before the University moved and I could imagine what it must have been like to go to the American University in Cairo in Midan Tahrir before it became a corporate desert spectacle on the fringes of the Cairo Governate. Like being part of something bigger, maybe. In the cab, Ambereen and I were talking about how we don't really feel spiritual energy here, but that everyone elsewhere not-here is always talking about it. But sometimes I almost feel it, maybe. There was something last night in the hundred-year-old peeling paint and mirrored walls and defiantly drinking men. "You are thinking about staying now, maybe, after you see this place?" Kareem asked me. I told him I wasn't, but it is never easy to give up even the things you want to give up, sometimes, because there is always the chance you could have wanted them if you tried harder. I put my number in Kareem's phone and he said he would call me today. I don't expect him to actually call me, but maybe he will, and maybe I will start to try harder, and my life will cease to be about moving through a series of familiar rooms but rather about touching the still-unknown with my eyes open, and when I leave I will have had something and will be leaving something concrete behind rather than an absence in a vacuum, a boulder rather than a crater.

Ambereen is on the phone across the table from me right now, we are at a coffee shop eating omelette wraps and potato wedges, and she is arguing with someone about something. "No, it matters. It matters."

Right now in this second I feel okay-okay and I don't know why but I agree with her.