44 richer and poorer I have the signifiers. My great grandfather was a scholar and calligrapher. He was one of the first photographers in Egypt. There's a street named after him. My grandfather hid Sadat in the basement when he was a revolutionary. Mubarak sent my family a telegram when my grandmother died. We're members of the oldest and most exclusive club in Egypt. My father occasionally worked for a King. My classmates were princes, princesses and the children of oil executives. I went to a university with the political and business elite of the country. Because I had a breakdown around the right people at the right time, I'm also connected to figures in the counterculture. I didn't feel or understand that I was well off growing up because I was beaten so much and I didn't have any social skills. It was a very strange childhood. I mentioned before I was shipped off to a public high school in Florida. Before that I was a four year old refugee fleeing Kuwait during the first Gulf war. After that, life in Riyadh was going to a British school in the morning and coming back home to hell in the evening. Then the magic Filipino fishing town on Ticao island in the summers. I'd wash up from a pump in the backyard and play with my grandparents' pigs and chickens. Then we'd get first class seats on a plane to California/whatever holiday destination in the States. Baba would steer us into the Ambassadors club and confused businessmen would wonder why three little kids were sitting at a bar. Then Cairo and Alexandria where we'd meet relatives I'd never heard of. My paternal grandmother and everyone in the family treated my mother terribly in Egypt. My grandmother was schizophrenic and everybody ignored it. They said she was spiritual and could see djinn. The djinn were housekeepers trying to murder her. Or a homicidal version of my mother. I only know this because I look like my mother. When my grandmother had alzheimers she could no longer mask anything and she spoke to me as if I were my mother. Z used to be a nightmare too. I understand it now. They forced her to marry her first husband. If I did what I was supposed to do I guess I would've ended up divorced from the abusive son of an ambassador (or some other bureaucrat) like my sister. Or I would've moved into Ozzy's villa in the country and we'd traumatize 3.5 children. He'd be a less charismatic version of a 50s husband and I'd snap and burn everything down. If I didn't give Nady his ring back, we would've had excruciatingly silent dinners with our 3.5 kids in Ohio. He'd be passive aggressive for years and then outraged and shocked when I inevitably cheat. Probably with his brother. Nah, I wouldn't do that to Nora. One of the obnoxious podcast guys then. If I kissed Sara, everybody would've cut me off. She'd bully me into mediocre art collaborations and discard me for being too compliant or not enough. I'd probably still self harm. I'd probably die. I wish I was what my professors thought I'd be I wish I knew how to market myself Would I have been building installations in Berlin? Feuding with and 'me too'-ing that fucking asshole in Houston? Would I have purple hair and tattoos and orgies on Tuesdays Swimming on Thursdays Gardening on Mondays Would I miss my family? Maybe find a new one that didn't hurt so much |