Thank You

*This is a pointed letter, continue at your own risk. Or maybe it's a work of fiction. Meh, your call.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you.
This is what I realized I hadn't said to you yet.

***

I'm a very passionate person, and anyone who knows me well could probably roll their eyes and provide you with about five stories about that, off the top of their heads and without batting an eyelash. It's true, with girls I'm either indifferent about them or head over heels for them. Not that I show it, mind you, but it's still there. If a girl gets under my skin, she lives there like a parasite leeching off my thoughts and emotional capacity for a life span about as long as this tortured metaphor's. Not only that, but I'm extremely unpredictable. It can take me days to get over a girl who locked eyes with me from across a busy room, hours to get over a girlfriend, months to get over a girl I met for three days.

In other words, you.

Without stressing the point too much, I've only ever been in love once and it didn't end very well. And when I say it didn't end very well, I mean it in the same sense that playing the bagpipes to soothe a raging grizzly bear wouldn't end very well. Long story short, eventually I realized that I hadn't felt that way about any other girl because I'd put up too many defenses and completely given up on the idea of trusting a girl enough to allow myself to like her. Yeah yeah, mushy mushy stuff, blah de blah de blah.

My point being that I was completely unprepared to deal with how you made me feel for the very short period of time that we've known each other for. Not that I felt it immediately, mind you. At first, as always, I was indifferent. You were just someone I had to deal with. It didn't take long to warm up to you, but I'm a friendly guy so I put it down to that and left it there. As time went on, I frequently caught myself looking at you without quite knowing why I was doing it... maybe I was bored and your face was the most pleasant thing around to look at -which it was- but it doesn't make sense because I had to crane my neck to look at you. When we talked, I was actually listening and not secretly thinking about chocolate cake. Whenever we playfully touched, it didn't feel forced. I didn't understand why it bothered me when you were being flirty with other guys.

 Bit by bit, as I started coming out of my shell, I started appreciating how beautiful you are and how there seems to be a haze around you, hiding the immediate universe around your face, overshadowing your surroundings as they fade into complete insignificance beside your radiant smile. Suddenly I'm not just hanging out with you because meh there's nothing good on television -which is my usual motivation to do stuff- but because I actively seek you out because I actually want to be around you. Subtly, without even knowing it, I crossed the border from indifferent to smitten. And I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you felt the same way.

And just like that, the real world stepped in and it was all over.

I had to take a 37 hour trip back home, which was every bit as exhausting as it sounds- even more so. I didn't have any money because I'd lost my wallet and I'd vowed not to ask my dad for any extra cash. Well, I had a $100 bill I didn't want to break because I wanted to give it back to dad because it was his money (I'd promised myself I'd pay for the trip on my own) and a couple of dollars and a pocketful of cents. I spent 6 hours on the floor at JFK, hungry and sick, surviving on tap water and the stale popcorn and candy bars I bought for my $3.89 (I still remember the number).

But I digress.

You'd left such an impression on me that even as I sat there, coughing my head off and eating cheap popcorn, I had to take out my tablet and start jotting down notes about how I was feeling. I was afraid I would forget the feeling and I wanted to put it down in words as soon as I could. Before I knew it, I was on the flight, and it was all I could do to wait  until I got to Amsterdam to... party, you ask? Get some well-deserved rest from my 37 hour-long journey? Hang out with my best friend who I hardly ever see?

All I wanted to do was get to his house so I could sit down and write that blogpost I wrote a few months ago.

Jet-lagged, hungry, penniless, homeless, sleepy, sick and in fucking Amsterdam, and all I could think of during my 12 hour transit was you and how I couldn't even wait to get back home to write down what I was feeling because I was afraid words would fail me if I waited. I wanted to save that feeling; immortalize it... preserve it. If I could, I would have framed that feeling and hung it up on my bedroom wall, because it was nothing short of a miracle.

This is what I'll always be grateful to you for. I thought I'd never feel that way about anyone else, and you proved me wrong. You proved that I could have chemistry with a girl and like her and be a smitten idiot. You'll always be that girl to me; the girl I wish I could have been with if circumstances had been different. The girl who showed me that there is still a chance for a broken someone like me to -in the everlasting words of Joey Tribbiani- "grab a spoon". You gave me the most valuable gift you could have given me.

You gave me hope.

Which is why you'll always be special to me, and why I will always wonder what could have been.

Cloudy with a Chance of Politics

I woke up.

Let me explain why that's weird.

I am not exactly what you'd call a lucky person. I was born during the Egyptian revolution of 1919 against the British crown. And when I say during, I of course mean while it was happening, but I also mean where it was happening.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 is widely accredited for being the first revolution in Egyptian history with active female participation, and it just so happened that my 8-month pregnant mother, God bless her soul - in all her infinite wisdom- decided to participate. Apparently, giving birth to a cumulative litter of 12 children over a very long and productive life of almost 30 years makes a woman... battle-hardened, for lack of a better word.

 At any rate, my mother was marching all over the place, as only a pregnant woman can, lashing out at people with her ample uterus and presumably my head within (which would account for many of my decisions in later life). Her entourage of similarly battle-hardened friends/midwives helped -more like pushed, shoved, pulled and towed- her forward, clearing a wide circle of emptiness around her, much like a penicillin pill would do in a petri dish of E. Coli bacteria; give a person too many tastes of your elbow/knee/my head within a huge uterus, and they would eventually learn to steer clear of the raging pregnant lady and her bodyguards. As if people really need to be warned against that.

It was in that charmingly soothing atmosphere that my mother had her contraction. Just one. One could just as easily cough up a gob of phlegm as it was for her to give birth to me. While standing up. One of the midwives tried to catch me before I hit the ground, but had no such luck. Presumably holding true to the five second rule, she picked me up anyway and wiped me on her galabeyya (traditional Egyptian clothes). There was also the small matter of the umbilical cord, which the midwife was kind enough to bite off. My mother then reportedly pushed ahead through the demonstration to get a larger share of the gunfire, and was rewarded by about 7 poor bullets which probably ricocheted off her balls of steel because she survived and lived to the ripe old age of 90.

What happened to me, you ask? One of the midwives stuck me in her bosom for safe-keeping.

Flash forward 23 years, and the year is 1942. Where am I? You guessed it!

In Alamein, recruited by the British Army to fight in the North Africa campaign, against Rommel, the Desert Fox.

The story of how I got recruited is quite amusing; was I drunk when I applied? No. Was it to pay off a debt? No. Was it to support my wife and 59 children? Also no. My illiterate mother, God bless her soul, got hoodwinked by a desperate British recruitment officer into signing me up, thinking it's a Welfare form; my mother basically fell victim to the world's first Nigerian Prince scam. Well, actually I'm the one who fell victim for it, but that's neither here nor there.

So the 13th of July, 1942 found me in a ditch in Alamein, preparing for a German Panzer offensive. In case you're historically illiterate, the Germans' ace in the hole in World War II were their tanks, and they employed them in Blitzkreig tactics to overwhelmingly efficient results. Efficient for the Germans. Bad for us.

Suddenly, a hand grenade took care of my entire squad, except me because I was conveniently curled in the fetal position behind a concrete wall and singing lullabies to soothe myself. One would think that makes me lucky. One would be wrong because I was then captured by the Germans as I tried to explain that I was only there because my illiterate mother signed me up and I'm really quite a nice guy once you get to know me and would you please stop pulling me so hard.

Not being a stranger to all the stories of what Germans do to their non-Aryan prisoners, I decided to die heroically with a gun in my hand and I snatched one from the soldier who was dragging me along. Just as I prepared to cap a mother fucker, I realized that he was smiling and jabbering away in incomprehensible German. I pulled the trigger, and the pathetic metallic click that followed was almost as comic as the sound a balloon makes as it lets the air out when it's untied.

Just as they were preparing to put me down like a particularly amusing rabid dog who's been chasing his tail for 3 days, I got caught in the middle of a surprise British counter attack and was instead captured by the British, who thought I'd turned traitor because I had a gun and yet failed to cap a mother fucker. So I was then captured by my own army and put to questioning. The only thing that saved my unlucky ass was that they realized the gun was empty before they started the questioning, and that I must have either fired it or run out of ammo. I was dishonorably discharged not long after -which was a way of cheating me of my pay, I suppose- when the North African campaign was over and they rightfully realized that I was useless.

Who should happen to hire me now as a palace guard? Why, King Farouk, of course!

Perhaps thinking that a WWII veteran battalion of palace guards would be more intimidating than 3am 3abdo (the palace doorman), the king then hired all the Egyptian survivors of the Battle of Alamein and posted them in strategic locations around his palaces. I was posted on the doors of Kasr 3abdeen on the 23rd of July 1956. Perhaps that date rings a bell. Perhaps it rings a dozen bells. Perhaps it drives a battalion of tanks towards Kasr 3abdeen, because that's exactly what happened next. You might be surprised to know that staring down the barrel of a hostile tank is not as spiritually fulfilling as we've been led to believe.

The king, being a truly patriotic man (no sarcasm here), surrendered the palace and refused help from the British, famously saying that he would much rather not be king of Egypt than let a single drop of Egyptian blood be spilled. Which was noble and heroic for him, but not so much for me because the next thing I knew was being hit on the head with the butt of a soldier's rifle who seemed to have been sore at his being cheated of his daily quota of Egyptian blood and decided to take it out on me.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up and I wasn't in the palace, or in a prison, or in 1956.

You see, I seem to recall that electricity was invented in 1956.
But I woke up in a dark, candle-lit room with no other source of light whatsoever.
Wow, I must be in the middle ages.

There was an old man sitting by my hospital bed. He didn't seem to know me; he was just there because he was napping and the hospital had no other places for him to sit. I shrugged. Egyptian hospitals will always be the same.

After a few minutes of hoarse yelling, the old man stirred at the cacophony I was making. After a few more minutes of hoarse yelling, he still had no idea what I was saying. I pointed at a calendar on the wall and shrugged, meaning "what day is it?". He said "Wednesday". I pointed at it again. He said Wednesday again.

This went on for a while.

Eventually, he understood me, and to my eternal surprise he said "Wednesday, the 20th of August, 2014". I found a notepad on my nightstand, and I scribbled "how come we don't have electricity anymore?". Thankfully he was literate, and he replied "May God protect our Sissi". I asked why the hospital was so busy. he said "May God protect our Sissi". I asked who Sissi was, he replied "SHHHHHHHH, Do you want to get us both killed?". He then whispered (yelled at the top of his lungs, but he didn't know that) that he's our president. I asked him if we were free of the British, and he said "May God protect our Sissi, he protected us from the Muslim Brotherhood". The man was brainwashed cleaner than a microwaved hard disk. I asked if the hungry were fed and if the unemployment rates were down. He gave the same reply and added that he was hungry and unemployed but as long as Sissi is his lord and savior he shalt be fine. Since Sissi seemed to be such an impressive leader, I asked him the only question to come to a pan-Arab's brain from 1956;
I asked him if Palestine was liberated yet, and the old man laughed so hard he died in his chair. Literally.
I then yelled for help, and the man's family thought I'd killed him and they stabbed me. But I died happily.

You wanna know why? For one thing, it's because it was probably a nightmare and that I would probably wake up again in prosperous, classy and wealthy 1950s Egypt... but also because even the unluckiest wretch who lived in presumably the darkest era of Egyptian history couldn't stand to see 2014, Sissi's Egypt.

May God protect him, of course.