Kites:
When the spring arrives the wind blows in Alexandria. It’s not any
kind of wind, it’s a stubborn wind that sweeps the whole city, sneaking through
the leaks in the buildings, tousling the ideas, rolling-up the skirts of women
and the galabiyya of men.
When the spring comes and the wind blows in Alexandria, the sky is
filled with kites. Children and those who have been children go out to the
streets carrying their hand-made kites. Cane structures with plastic skin and
long laced tails that dance among the clouds. Sometimes they dance softly,
sometimes they dance hard. Shaking their tails to the beat of the wind when
spring comes to Alexandria.
When spring comes and kites dance in Alexandria, it’s the beginning
of the fishing season. Hook fishing in the tramway’s cables and the balconies
and the barbwire of public buildings. Because it happens that, sometimes, in
the midst of the hectic dance between the plastic and the wind, kites stay
suspended in the air, hooked in the pike.
And then the summer comes and the wind slows down, the sun blasts
the windows and heats the asphalt. Autumn and the rain and winter and the fog.
And kites remain peeled in the void, almost flying, almost dying.
Dreams:
I live in a fourteenth floor with windows as wide as walls. So wide
the windows that on foggy days I live in a cloud. I sleep in a room in a
fourteenth floor and sometimes vertigo sneaks into my dreams. When this happens
I dream, for instance, that I fall from the window. I dream the descent through
the fourteen floors between my clouds and the ground.
To fall while dreaming in Alexandria happens to be pleasant because
in the middle of the flight you realize that there’s something different. When
reaching the twelfth floor you wonder why are you so calm and you find out
that, against all odds, the air blows horizontally, holding you. That you don’t
fall without control, on the contrary, you glide slowly like a kite. And you
wake up before reaching the fifth floor and you’re happy because you’ve seen
the world from the fall.
Falls:
Five years ago the calendar was torn in Egypt and the world was shacked for a while. Since then, in this city of kites and heights, the years count 364
days and a 25th of January. Although to be honest, for the last five years the
years grow shorter every time as the 25th is followed by the 28th and the 18th
and the 30th and the calendar is progressively stuffed with commemorations and
funerals and elections and coups and victories and defeats.
A handful of people gather in Cairo on the 24th January two
thousand and fifteen, last day of the year since five years ago, celebrating
the fallen for the victory of a revolution that tastes like a defeat. They
carry banners and flowers for the martyrs of
Tahrir. And on the way, in the middle of a street with stores and policemen
and passers-by, someone kills someone. Someone, while on duty, shoots, a woman
who’s mourning her dead.
In the middle of the street and in the middle of a defeat a woman
starts falling while her body starts dying. As her legs and her lungs and her
memory start to die, someone holds her in the middle of the fall. A man embraces a
fading woman so that she doesn’t die on the ground. The last day of the year a
woman falls and a man holds her.
Hugs:
It’s the twenty fifth of January in Alexandria and we’re in the
street. Surrounded by people who cry and who carry the body of yesterday’s
falling woman. We all fall little by little while we see our faces veiled with
sadness. Rage has settled between our eyebrows ageing our faces and emptying
our bellies while filling the network with mourning birds.
Friends keep arriving and we hug not to talk. We hold while falling
knowing that this fall is not a stumble. Knowing in silence that here you fall
because they throw you and the bodies get trapped in the thorns of the flowers
for the dead. We hug because we know how to cry but we don’t know what to say.
A friend has been mourning a widow through every hour of the night.
We walk to a café to be accompanied in this parenthesis. He asks me to say
something and to smile. Because like this we will smile together along the way.
He tells me that he doesn’t know how to start building the plan for the next
364 days and I tell him that we can start planning the next 60 minutes. That we
should plan how to win for 60 minutes every day.
A victory like a hug in the fall or like a dried kite in the sky.
Text originally published in spanish in Nativa magazine.
