After 17 months with the firm, I've decided to move down. I can say that I have done myself a great service by following a dream, fulfilling it, living it, and now coming out of it, knowing that I didn't let it pass me by.
Next month, I'll be heading back into the world of PHP web development. It's a little bit daunting as my work ethic has taken a serious beating in the last 3 months. I've become very accustomed to doing jack shit during the day. That will come to a sudden end when I start at my new job here.
It's been my first month in the flat and I don't know really where I stand. I enjoy living alone. I enjoy staying out late and coming home when I can. I want to feel guilty about it, but I don't. In a sense, living at home with family is starting to become a past memory. And that's only because the past months have been really traumatic. I think it's obvious from the few posts which have shown up here. I'm writing less and producing less art as I now divert most of my attention, outside of work or errands, into other things – pursuing girls and relationships.
I feel confliced about that. I'm not sure if that's really what I want. I'm not sure if this is who I'd like to be for years to come. My interests and aspirations have deadened since the breakup in December. I'm really only pursuing one thing.
A lot of things died and disappeared with that breakup. Like I was heading speedily towards many goals, excited, driven, passionate about film and writing and everything else I was doing. But the relationship ended and I ended too. The person that I was, that I had been painstakingly building and improving since I moved back from England… that person was gone. He faded away with the tears cried, the confusion felt, the betrayal experienced, the loneliness consumed. He is no longer here.
The only thing right now, a new thing, keeping me connected to a deeper, more engaged self is photography. I can feel my eyes now seeing things and looking for beauty to be captured. And when I read, if I read, I feel that non-existent Mina return albeit in flashes of uncertainty.
In two distinct phases, all that ever defined me as me has vanished, or become so structurally weak that I'm liable to anything breaking me. The first phase was the relationship ending and the second phase was the dissolution of my family as a sanctuary and place of identity. In that second phase also, I've seen my quest to acquire Egyptian identity, something precious to me where words fail, cease. I came to see what it meant to be Egyptian in multiple scenarios and I could not think like that all or live like that or act like that. I suddenly became alien to something I thought lived in my heart, secure.
If before I said I was a second-generation, immigrant Egyptian, I now say I'm even more an Orientalist than I was. I speak Arabic but I'm not Egyptian. I understand and love the culture, but it's not my own. I'll always be an outsider. Always. To any culture, no matter how much people are well-meaning. I will always be struggling to fit in, to learn a whole new idiom and world of people. I will always feel like nowhere is my home except where I force it to be. There is no one place where I'm naturally welcome because everywhere, I'm a foreigner. Une etranger.
I watch movies still and listen to the music, but I do it as an employee of the culture, not as a shareholder, not as someone who lives in the house of the owner. I'm an indentured servant, hired to render it to the best of my love and capacity, given my foreigner status. As much as I can fool anyone around me that I grew up in Egypt all my life, I can't fool the truth – that I'm a foreigner in my own culture that I love so much.
No effort of mine will make me more Egyptian or not. I will always be on the periphery. I spent years and years of my naive and pure innocence, loving this culture and people who were never prepared to accept me. There would be always have been the point where no effort of mine could render me a native.
"Last sanctuary falls…" It fell at home. I feel like a stranger too in my own home. I used to wake up and just hunger for someone to come in and ask about my life, like my sister would get. I used to want to be accepted and validated by my parents. I used to want to be understood and encouraged by them, in everything that I do. I used to want to be just as I am with them. But when it became critical, they chose their own identity and culture over me.
Now… I'm just this drone. An aprosopic drone with no direction or real drive. No home or real final resting place. I have my own flat now – my own nest – but it's empty. There are no people.
I've been fighting this for many, many years. I feel it's time to embrace my loneliness, singlehood, and lonesomeness. It's time to stop wanting to be with people and understood by people and accepted by people and welcomed and embraced by people. Enough years of my life wasted, from family to friends, on a pointless endeavour like this. Live on my own, rejoice when a loved one enters, don't be disappointed when they leave, and in between those rare times, just accept the fact that you're on your own.
I'm working on telling myself that I'm money and last night proved that. I'm alone, but I'm money.
I'm alone, but I'm money. I think. I hope so.
