Creative Writing - Travel Narrative

"I May Never Leave"

Today is the day.  After a year and a half, that day that always seemed far away has finally arrived.  I am leaving Egypt and I simply cannot believe it.  Although returning to Chicago means going home to parents and family and friends and grad school and every one of a thousand things I’ve loudly proclaimed to be missing from my life in Egypt, the prospect of actually leaving Egypt is a depressing one.

Have I fallen in love with Egypt or have I simply settled in here?  Either way, it seems odd to me to leave a place in which I’ve made a life for myself – and an interesting life at that.  I have come to wear this city like a second skin and to be lifted out of it by plane tonight is going to feel wrong.  It feels wrong already.  I miss it even as I am rooted in it, as I sit in my flat in the neighborhood of Sahafayeen with the usual random shouting and odd clattering noises drifting in through the window. 

Perhaps what is painful in leaving Egypt is that although I know I can return to the place, I have come to love the way I live.  I’m constantly being tested, being forced to observe, being surprised, being faced with obstacles.

The thought of going back to Chicago and re-adopting a blasé attitude is sickening.  And yet perhaps Egypt will have taught me to really see Chicago.  Perhaps Egypt has taught me to really see.

I remember being new here, doing everything for the first time, getting everything wrong, all the time.  This week has been full of last times and I’ve been struck by how familiar things have become.

Cairo hasn’t always been good to me, but that is not what Cairo is about.  I’ve been good to it and maybe that’s why I’ve gotten so much out of it.  There’s a lot to see here but none of it is fancy or flashy – none of it is decorated with flashing lights so that your attention is drawn towards it.  No, no.  This city will never ever make things that easy.  But the images of the Cairo I know will be burned into my mind forever:

A tiny boy balancing precariously on the massive city wall outside Anwar; a small child curled up at the foot of a huge Pharaonic statue, sleeping in her rags as this monument to wealth towered over her; the grinning milkman standing outside my door on Fridays with his enormous metal milk jug strapped to his shoulder; the dozens of minarets that dot the skyline every time I look at the sky; the old man leaning out of his window every morning at 7:20 when I would ride by in the school bus on my way to school; the hot hot pink flowers growing everywhere, the richest color of flower I've ever seen; the hideously ugly Ramadaan lamps; the little boys in gallabeyas, hitching them up to play kickball; the women, wearing black, arranging wreaths of flowers by the side of the road; the donkey carts loaded high with vegetables; the layer of dust on my balcony; the layer of dust on everything…

These images are intoxicating; as time passes they will become even more so.  This heady feeling of Egypt-lust on the eve of my departure reminds me of a line in a novel by Michael Ondaatje:  “Eventually, however, she manages to resist the old lie that life abroad is more real.  It’s just that the stories are less familiar and therefore harder to ignore.”