I’m wombed in an EgyptAir blanket. The woman next to me tugs at my ankles, stretching my legs out across the empty middle seat, drapes the blanket over me. Maybe she’s sensed my permafrost.
I find that she’s roughly the same age as my mother, from Mansoura like my father. We talk the way Egyptians talk, endlessly and with a certain phosphoresce. It’s towards this light that the woman in the row in front of us turns her head, squeezing between the gaps in the seats as if through the Strait of Gibraltar. I find that she’s roughly the same age as my mother, from Luxor like my cousins.
Rows 10 and 11, A-C, hold the largest concentration of Egyptians on this Manchester flight to Cairo. The three of us. The flight attendants are excited to have their kin on board, tell us they’re glad our blood isn’t heavy, that it’s sticky with honey. We form a sort of triumvirate, paid tribute in armfuls of extra mango juice and salted pretzels.
The air chimes with our laughter for six hours. They commiserate: The Europeans don’t really talk much. Barely look you in the eyes.
I pretend that I don’t usually act the same, having been taught that these are the proxemics of the civilised. That the civilised are in counter-rhythm to one another. In polite society, we are all acolytes of the aloof, we keep our hands and feet inside the ride at all times, we write in first person.
My sky-mothers get me an extra meal, so that I can try both the chicken and the fish. I’m bloated with invitations to my new homes, to half the city lights now in view from the window. I tell them that, after a few days with my friends in downtown, I’m going to see my sky-land-universe mother. I tell them that I haven’t really experienced sky, land, universe for the last seven months. I’ve been suspended in liminal space.
The airport is supersensorial.
One of my sky-mothers jogs after my bag on the conveyer belt the second I point it out, a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. The other marches up theatrically to the Etisalat kiosk assistant who wasn’t able to reactive my sim card. They tell (threaten) my taxi driver to take care of me in a singsong lilt. We kiss cheeks and exchange numbers and bifurcate.
They’re both heading to New Cairo, which is to say they still have one foot in Manchester. My parents pleaded with me to stay there, perhaps in Tagamo3, where they speak even less Arabic than I do. Why stay in the epicentre of one of the most dangerous cities in the world?
To them, my Airbnb may as well have been a child-sized coffin (I may as well have been a child). I remind them that the buildings in downtown were made in the image of the French and British, so I still have one foot in the imperial core. My Airbnb is a sacred thing.
We’re a strange looking trio, my friends and I. White girl that we call white boy, plus two Egyptians-in-waiting. A cacophony of personal styles: cargo shorts, Uptempos + traditional jewellery, silk + traditional jewellery (two of us are unified in our mimesis). A blonde low taper fade, a curly black mullet (à la Ziad Zaza, as a passerby comments), and a distinctly diasporic hijab, diverged from the homogenising combo of white undercap + patterned chiffon loop-de-looping the neck.
Where are you from? The perennial question.
Here, two-thirds of us say.
No. Newcomers.
Latecomers, we insist.
On polychronic time, just like you.
But, really, we’re too British for this shit. The whole show-up-two-hours-after-the-agreed-upon-time routine. The we’ll-get-there-when-we-get-there, the what’s-the-rush, the let’s-meet-for-breakfast-wait-did-you-think-I-really-meant-breakfast?
We’re too British for the collective. Conversation is promiscuous here. Easy, everywhere. As is eye contact. As are jokes. This country runs on bribes and jokes.
We say joke-adjacent things, take the piss, talk to/swap with/investigate everyone, turn everything into a tabla or a stage. Our souls waft in and out of us, not sure how much we will commit to them. We dance in the street, shimmies and serpentine hands and hip drops and soul drops in and stays in. We’re somewhere beyond our infrahuman post-human lives. Our laughter rips through the air for six days. We are alive. It’s been so long since we’ve been alive.
My mother jokes, she’s glad I made it out of downtown alive.