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You just knew she spent too much time alone in front of mirrors, crying.
No place is better than any other, we only think it is.
My first month in Cairo, I kept mistaking strangers for family. Everywhere I looked I saw my parents and my sister, Lulu.
If everyone you knew jumped off a bridge, wouldn’t you believe you could fly?
In the mornings, the shopkeepers and doormen are all out on the street thrashing water on the gravel, making mud of the dust, so when I trail through on my way to work my hems are browned. What’s that about? Do they imagine they’re cleaning?
first world contact and old-world etiquette.
nothing makes for revolution like cocaine.
Is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?
I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me.
He wishes me not a good morning, but a childlike morning or a morning of flowers. 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.
She sighed dreamily with the whole of both lungs like a woman in the arms of a man she loves. Then I swear I heard her say: Pomegranate seeds.
Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.
It is in Arabic that lovers murder each other with side tables, and it is in English that they theorize about what it means to be murdered by side table.
I’ve dated enough to understand how I am used by men who reject themselves: it’s a hyphen-trick. With Elijah, it was the same. The boy from Shobrakheit wanted an in-betweener.
am Egyptian—recognizable but also improved by Western inflection, carrying in my fashion sense and orthodontically straight teeth the whiff of opportunity, opulence, and pride. From kissing-distance, his reflection in my eyes is one of triumph, a boy worthy of first world love. His entire generation is scrambling to get out; anyone who can leave the country has left already for Europe.
