I'm in Love

"Nobody in his right mind would've left her.
I had to be crazy to say goodbye.
Nobody in his right mind would've left her.
Even my heart was smart enough to stay behind."

-George Strait

So I think I'm in love.

Why do I love her you may ask? Her faults and annoyances are overwhelming, and yet that's what love is right? I can't really help it, I love her despite it all.

I'm sitting in Al-Azhar park with my Egyptian 16 year old sister and my roommate. The group of veiled woman near us send a two year old boy over to give me a raw onion, complete with plant.

I'm waiting in the metro station. A father, his young daughter, and very young son are discussing the word water very loudly and close to me. I smile, the daughter smiles shyly back. The little son looks at me expectantly. I ask if he wants water, they say yes, he drinks some, they thank me. They leave. A woman draped in a beautiful red scarf walks up to me and asks me a question I don't understand. We talk a little in Arabic, she's Sudanese and squeezes my hand saying something about how America and Sudan are together and she leaves. I wait a little longer...

I'm sitting in a cafe and my friend F peers earnestly out from under her higab into my eyes and asks,"why did God have to die, I still don't understand?"

I'm walking along the Nile, and tiny white puffy clouds are everywhere, the water is sparkling, the men sit on the benches reading newspapers, families are strolling, and so am I, strolling home.

I'm eating a ridiculously sweet tiny banana that G bought in the suq while I held the baby. I am sitting on the floor of my family's home, G next to me, baby M on the bed, Grandmother and her son on the couch, Arabic swirling around my head that I can half understand now, and I can't even imagine how amazing the whole concept of this banana is, let alone the tiniest atom of the existence of these my mother and brother and sisters and this baby, a tiny, growing human soul, or the fact that I belong here in this home despite all factors that say I don't.

I am leaning against a cement column in the El-Maasara metro station. My muscles are slightly sore and twitchy after carrying an infant through the entire neighborhood. I can see one star through the wires above the tracks. I can feel a genuinely cold breeze through my hair, and I can hear crickets. I love crickets. I close my eyes and imagine I'm in a forest, in my backyard in Grand Rapids, or a summer night camping in the Californian desert, but then all of a sudden I don't want to be any of those places. I want to be here with my beloved, leaning against a cement column, looking at the smoky factory, enfolded in the murmuring voices of some 20 million people belonging to her.

I hear the metro pull up to the station, this sound is a murmuring, rumbling, screeching brakes, no longer grating on my nerves, its deep in my bones.

I step onto the metro. We lurch forward and the murmuring, rumbling, screeching brakes is right below me, even deeper down inside me. I get up to give up my seat for one of the old women that get on about half way through, as all good Cairenes do. The train lurches forward and I fall against this niqabi (eyes showing only)woman. We grab each other's hands, she pushes me back up, and I'm on my way.

I love her spontaneity, I love her helping hands reaching out to catch me, give me a seat, welcome me, show me, I love her secret passageways and ruined buildings, I love her gaudy lights plastered over mosques and churches, I love her bananas and figs and pomegranates, I love her overdone sense of fashion. But really I just love her.

I am in love with this city. And I start singing George Strait knowing that my heart will be staying behind.