If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

I thought I had cried until I fogged up all the roads going anywhere, that I’d never again see beyond my outstretched arms.

I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.

The sequence hardly matters, the result was the same.

Can a man and a woman fetishize each other in equal measure, or must one always be outdone by the other?

You dog, what is yours will always come for you.

I realize I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me.

He texts, I hope your day will be like the birds. I hope your night will be like the childhood of trees. Don’t be sad, my moon. I have a remembering of the lives I didn’t live.

More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life. I’m learning slowly that having money and the option to leave frays any claim I have to this place. It turns out that to be clean in Egypt is just to be free of Egypt, to exercise the choice to stay or go elsewhere, which most of the population cannot do.

I resent him because I recognize him.

It’s as though the city were deliberately designed to resist comprehension and to discipline those who left for daring to return. You have either lived here and you know, or you never have and never will.

What if female arousal is just the belief that you will not die at this man’s hands?

But I will extract their names from her in time.

We were naked in a soft light and my hunger climbed, it shouted through my shivering, like a bitch being drowned in the river.

She belongs to this apartment as much as I don’t.

We run hot water over our bodies and he soaps the day off my skin, kisses the top of my scalp, we make love everywhere.

A man wants to know who will close his eyelids when he dies, he explained,

Our relationship is fragile, sustained by habits we intuited from the beginning and now adhere to.

his body bears scars in places that should not have seen sharpness.

Kisses my fingertips one by one, and then the knuckles. We sleep and make love and eat and make love and sleep. We live like a married couple dreaming domestic dreams, until he wakes me up.

If your lover lives in a building grand enough to have a servants’ staircase, how long before she sends you down it?

How many fingers and toes will you sever before you’re small enough for a man to possess?

Which is more frightening—to wake up with injuries or a weapon in your hand?

If the beast is already in your house, does that make the wilderness safer?

Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.

giving me a pride beyond my means. She raised me to believe that wherever I went I would be recognized, I would be rewarded, celebrated, and only now do I see. It was an accident, but she handicapped me to a lifetime of scoffing at the very things I need. There is such a thing as princely poverty.

TRULY THE MOST DEPRESSING KIND OF RELATIONSHIP is one where the blood runs in both directions and it’s unclear who is to blame.