He pulled up at a traffic light. Well, you wouldn't call it a traffic light... more like a traffic free-for-all...
He lived in Egypt, you see. Egypt spits on your puny mortal "traffic lights". And whenever there happen to be traffic lights, they're more of a guideline than actual traffic control, followed only by foreigners who haven't been Egyptianized yet; fussy moms and old people.. but I digress. The point is, he was on his way to work as usual, but had neglected to sacrifice to the ancient Egyptian God of traffic "Amon-Shorta" (only Egyptians will get this joke), and lo and behold he was already two hours late.
It was one of these days where everything goes wrong; alarm doesn't go off, nothing to eat in the fridge, spending half an hour ironing a stubbornly crinkled shirt that looks like it was dragged through the Vietnam war.. which is ironic, because he ended up burning a hole right through the sleeve and having to iron another shirt instead. "Ain't bachelor life grand?" he thought, as he frantically looked for the keys that were in his pocket and the glasses he was already wearing while simultaneously hopping on one foot trying to wear a sock on his other foot, stumbling over his shoes, and falling face-first into a box of left-over pizza from three days ago he kept forgetting to throw out.
Rushing out of the house with small crumbs of pizza crust stuck in his beard, he realized he forgot to wear his shoes and rushed back in again furiously cursing in his most colorful profanities at no one in particular. When he was finally out of the house, already half an hour late and looking about as sharp as a spoon or a particularly dull butter knife, he was greeted by the sight of the bawab (or janitor/security guard/morality police/delivery guy/garage caretaker combo, for all non-Egyptians) who had just covered his car in soap. Ironically, the bawab assumed that because the protagonist (let's call him Mahmoud) was so late, he'd decided to skip work altogether so it was a good time to wash his car.
Mahmoud, being as polite as the British, more hot-tempered than an Italian mobster from Sicily who's just watched his sister get whistled at by a mobster from another family (also smarter than a German nuclear physicist and hotter than Brad Pitt and awesome at making huge drawn-out similes and currently single, ladies ;) ) had to fight the urge to throttle the bawab for having such a brilliant deductive mind that led him to the conclusion that because he was late it made sense to make him even more late, because of reasons. Instead, he wore a forced smile and thanked the bawab while inwardly wishing him and his family a painful death by anal sodomy, asked him to rinse off his car, and drove out of the garage all fast-and-furious-like at 70 kph (requiring considerable skill at maneuvering, if I might add) with heavy rock playing on his radio, only to get stuck in a traffic jam immediately outside.
Days went by; seasons changed; Kanye West and Kim Kardashian had a baby they named "North" in an act of complete dickery bordering on child-abuse; a nuclear Armageddon wiped out 99% of the human race; and still he found himself slumped in his car in heavy traffic, having shout-outs with people who cut him off and thinking longingly of death while his iPod shuffle tortured him with extremely ironic songs like "Happy" and "Highway to Hell". It was a mark of how terrible his mood was that when he saw one of the 3 pile-ups on the Ring Road that day, he caught himself inwardly wishing he'd been in one of them.
"Aaaaand of course", he thought; that today of all days would be the day he would receive 12 emails when it wasn't even 10 30 yet; all requiring his urgent attention.. and what worst-case-scenario-nightmare would it be, without his boss calling him 5 times to ask him where he was, his voice gradually rising from phone call to phone call -ranging in pitch from his carefully-cultivated, shareholder-reassuring, calm baritone to a high-pitched squeak you'd expect from a rat whose tail you stepped on- as he hoarsely yelled about corporate policy and how employees should always make sure to be at work before noon and how he didn't care about traffic jams or Armageddons or the environment or murdered kittens.
I'm not sure if you can tell, but he wasn't having a nice day.
It was while he was seriously beginning to consider getting out of his car and just running to work that he noticed her in his side-view mirror...
She was eating a sandwich and chain-smoking while yelling at the guy riding shotgun, spittle flying out of her mouth and coating his poor sweat (and now spittle)-drenched face as he cowered for cover from his 50-year old obese mother's pastrami rain of death- wait no, this isn't her, you pervs.. the other car, beside it.
Yes, that one.
In stark contrast to the typical Egyptian ma7shi-fuelled machine of hatred and despair mentioned above, she was simply beautiful (yes, now it's time for the sappy part, I'm a hopeless romantic, deal with it).
She was wearing the most elegant bored face of all-time. Taken out of context, you couldn't tell she was even bored at all... He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror, and saw the face of a middle-aged man who had curiously grown some more white hairs than earlier that morning, and suddenly noticed the pizza crumbs in his beard. He casually brushed them off while pretending to stroke his beard thoughtfully, hoping to convey an era of wisdom rather than misery and self-loathing. Tired of looking at his milk-curdling frown, he looked at her again and immediately felt better. The world was still a beautiful place if such an angelic face was still possible to exist.. in that miserable setting, most of all.
Her wavy blonde curls were elegantly sparkling in the early morning sun. You could tell that she didn't have time to do whatever it is girls do to their hair when they wake up in the morning -maybe she'd rushed out of the house as late as he was- but somehow he doubted that she could have done anything more to make it look any better. That girl could wake up in the morning and go straight to a fancy fund-raiser without even running a comb through her hair, and it gave her a low-maintenance vibe that somehow made her even more attractive than any carefully-polished trophy wife could ever be.
He must have been drooling too much because suddenly she noticed him staring at her.
It's a well-documented fact that Mahmoud doesn't like hazel-eyes, but hers were different... they weren't hazel; they were sunlight incarnated in human eyes... It almost hurt to look directly into them. They were perfectly-shaped, sharp and intelligent while still being playful and humorous.. The type of eyes you usually see at the optician's in advertisements for contact lenses.
And then she smiled.
Before that day, Mahmoud could be quoted as saying that the happiest moment of his life was that one time when he had three slices of cheesecake at Cheesecake Factory and almost fainted from the sugar rush... Now he could say that her smile beat even that, and gave him the same sugar-rush.
Not only did her smile reveal teeth as hideous as a camel's- just kidding, it's a check to see who's still with me.
Not only did her perfect, strawberry-red lips part to reveal porcelain-white teeth that glinted in the sunlight -reminding him on the only level of his existence that wasn't captivated by her smile that he should see his dentist one of these days- but also when her smile touched her eyes, they transformed into -green goblins made of cheese (still with me?)- beautiful pools of molten gold, full of life, energy and optimism. He could tell that this is not just a beautiful girl; this is a beautiful girl to have intelligent conversations-with; be yourself-around; laugh yourself into an early grave with and generally have enough fun to be illegal in Egypt. This is a girl to marry, not to stare at for.. 5 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour? He couldn't tell how long it had been... But time had stopped for him, and his surroundings didn't seem to matter one bit.
Inexplicably, he could already picture spending the rest of his life with her and growing old together.
They stared and smiled at each other in the middle of the traffic for what seemed like ages, and in the middle of the whirlpool of anger and Mediterranean temper and swear words and remorseless sunlight, they found happiness.. they found love.
Even if only for a few brief moments before they received the cosmic middle finger in the form of traffic magically clearing, just when he was about to get out of his car to go talk to her.
In some ways, parting with a fleeting imaginary romance in traffic was much harder than some break-ups he'd had.. knowing that there was a lot of potential, wasted because fate hadn't made their lives intersect in a more sociable setting was a very hard realization...
But seriously, fuck traffic in Egypt.
