Of birds and fish
When I woke up in the morning, I smoked some more. As I sat there meditating on the smoke of my cigarette, thinking how amorphous and translucent smoke is, how hypnotizing the way the smoke moves as I thought maybe Cairo is not supposed to be like New York, despite the shallow similarities. And its wrong to ask Cairo to be anything but Cairo. Maybe trying to believe that the same kind of sexual liberation that exists elsewhere can also exist in Cairo, as ridiculous and preposterous as it sounds. It would be like trying to shoot a bird in the sea or catch fish on trees. Its true that some fish can “fly” a few meters off the sea surface, but that does not make them birds, does it?
Maybe being embittered about my friends leaving is exactly the same as asking a fish to fly. Unfair and selfish.
And in that case, also cruel.
Maybe Cairo should be accepted for what it is, what it can offer, what one can get from it, nothing more.
Cities change, and people change, but there are certain things that will remain alien to every constitution, every fundamental composition of a place or of something.
Certain people in Cairo, certain things about Cairo can change, like little clouts of foreignness spread here and there. But Cairo in its totality, in its entirety shall remain what it is, and what it was.
A cosmopolitan city, of Arab-speaking Middle Easterners.
No amount of blogging will change that.
And those people who change, who want to change, who internalize the city and all that it is, all its inhabitants are the ones that should leave or do leave eventually.
Just like fish that develop wings and stop breathing through their gills.
They become aquatic mammals!
They live in the sea, but they are not cold blooded and they don’t lay eggs.
Not that Egyptians who live in Cairo are cold blooded or lay eggs, but they have certain ways of doing things, and I for one, have another way of doing things.
Mammals that live in the sea made quite an extraordinary evolution in comparison to the rest of their species. They have adapted in such magnificent ways.
Although I would not like to think of myself as a whale, or a seal but I don’t have gills, and if I stay long enough under water I suffocate.
Maybe my space - not the website - is a liminal space, something that borderlines two domains, two realms, two spheres, of water and air, of scales and feathers, of birds and fish…
Maybe being embittered about my friends leaving is exactly the same as asking a fish to fly. Unfair and selfish.
And in that case, also cruel.
Maybe Cairo should be accepted for what it is, what it can offer, what one can get from it, nothing more.
Cities change, and people change, but there are certain things that will remain alien to every constitution, every fundamental composition of a place or of something.
Certain people in Cairo, certain things about Cairo can change, like little clouts of foreignness spread here and there. But Cairo in its totality, in its entirety shall remain what it is, and what it was.
A cosmopolitan city, of Arab-speaking Middle Easterners.
No amount of blogging will change that.
And those people who change, who want to change, who internalize the city and all that it is, all its inhabitants are the ones that should leave or do leave eventually.
Just like fish that develop wings and stop breathing through their gills.
They become aquatic mammals!
They live in the sea, but they are not cold blooded and they don’t lay eggs.
Not that Egyptians who live in Cairo are cold blooded or lay eggs, but they have certain ways of doing things, and I for one, have another way of doing things.
Mammals that live in the sea made quite an extraordinary evolution in comparison to the rest of their species. They have adapted in such magnificent ways.
Although I would not like to think of myself as a whale, or a seal but I don’t have gills, and if I stay long enough under water I suffocate.
Maybe my space - not the website - is a liminal space, something that borderlines two domains, two realms, two spheres, of water and air, of scales and feathers, of birds and fish…
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