Au revoir!!

See you again is so much better than 'God be with ye' (good bye presumably)



Reality arrives upon me slowly. Myriam is leaving for college, and I feel like an old mother who is saying good-bye to her child. Shady is already gone, but Myriam and I’ve been so much closer – this goodbye is going to hurt. Can’t think of what to buy for her… hm, what did I need the most? What will she need the most? Money, I guess, but I don’t really have USD. And nowhere near a good enough sum to say ‘here ya go!’ I think I might make her a board of pictures. That seems like a good idea – for her to remember me and Kailash. And some stuff to hang on the wall, perhaps. Dali replicas.



I am sad. I wonder if I’m sad that she’s leaving, or that I’m not leaving, too. I think I’d be less sad if I knew she were coming back to Cairo eventually. It seems like I’ll always be here… but I wonder if that will prove to be the case. Life is long and ever-changing.



I wish I could collect all my friends into one place right here, right now, and then there would be an extended awkward silence of mixed chemistries, of untold stories that lie buried but that won’t arrive until the time is right or the memory is stirred like a drink that hits you just right, or that wee hour of the night that makes confessions seem like small-talk.



I wish for ordinary small-talk on a daily basis with a friend.



“Hi! How was class today?” I would ask



“It sucked, but I love Dr… blabla” [Meryam, you know you’d be talking about, and Myriam, too, hehe]



“When you complain about the heat and dust in Palestine, that’s when you know you own it”, or something to that effect is what Mourad Barghouti wrote in his book I Saw Ramallah. I want to complain about something…and the only thing I can complain of is boredom and having nothing to complain about. Surely I don’t watch enough world news, not even the Olympics, dearie me. I save my TV hours for soaps that make me smile, and à la Dido “it’s not so bad, not so bad at all.”