Home After Five Years

My father’s head peers over the couch in the dark and whispers ‘are you awake?’ I don’t know, am I? I’m lying on a mattress on the living room floor,

my hands dank and trembly, wondering if my parents will survive their mistakes... nothing like cold sweats on a warm sulphur Christmas. Outside, the city spills

past the contours of reality; each time I blink, an island surges out of the sea: some mad petrocrat’s wet dream, or luxury villas for sun-starved Russian gangsters...

At dusk, I stroll along the sliver of beach spared by the quicksilver illness we now call cement. The boardwalk’s semi-deserted, but by the railings,

the lonely Natashas sink their long nails into mangoes and sigh... ‘this is no place to live...’, a woman says to her boyfriend as they puff on their cigarettes,

‘not a place you call home.’ I can’t argue with that. All I see are skyscrapers and cranes that raise even more cranes. As a child, I imagined

those cranes were beanstalks connecting the Earth to the heavens, but there was no giant or golden goose in those clouds... now all I can think is how greed

is more intoxicating a brew than the sweat of good, honest people. Back at the flat, my mother sweeps gypsum and rubble while crouched on the last

powdery bit of wall that once separated her bedroom from her kitchen. When we wake up in the morning, she stares at the sky and looks for rain clouds,

but there’s not a single one in sight. The storm is in her head and her heart...still, it could be worse, even graveyards are places where flowers still bloom.

Through the paper-thin wall an inch from my head, I can hear Hitler ranting and raving to Gangnam style... Sharif, our neighbour from Cairo, works at IKEA;

he takes three buses to work and is plagued by the burdens of bribes, permits and slave wages, and bears it all with a smile, but why speak of it?

Happiness vanishes the moment it bursts the levee of the lips; his shivering wife keeps watch from her balcony like a sailor

forced to weather a storm in a crow’s nest. Starting tomorrow, I’m off again, free as a bird, a bird of passage more like...aboard the plane,

I’ll watch the island that once looked like my home continue to grow, swelling like a crusty cancer on the soft skin of the sea... come, come, that’s

enough now, remember you chose to live in the fire.