MeliGoesRogue

This quarantine has made me think of being apart. It was inevitable I suppose for an introspective heart like mine to eventually wander here. Truthfully I am surprised it took this long. In moments like these I seek out familiar things. Movies and music that will reverberate the echoes of my heart. I have written before of my Cairo Time.

I decided to lay my head and drift to the land of sand and pyramids and Umm Kulthum. Before I could find my way to Tareq I found an interview with the writer of the film. She talked about the pace of American love and romance, that need we seem to have for instant gratification. How important it was for her that the film reflect the languid pace of sometimes falling in love.

The irony to me is in 90 mins I fell in love with Tareq and Juliette and they with each other. The very things that should have pushed them away from each other, endeared them. It was not love at first sight. Instead it was built over experience and shared intimate moments. When I see Juliette I wonder how long she had waited for those moments of intimacy. Had she settled in her life to live without them or had they once been and simply faded. What of Tareq, him whose heart seems to closely reflect mine. Hidden and surviving till someone brings them the breath from their lungs. Choosing solitude to settling.

I have quarantined my heart, but not my body. I move about in the crowds. I sit down for dinner, drinks and conversation but my heart remains in a faraday cage.

I told someone tonight that I had locked it away from the world and from those who might break it in their desire to hold it. Even I can’t be trusted with her, having been so careless in the past. But as the house begins to settle with the contents of me within I can’t help but take the elevator down into the deep levels below and see if now I might be able to pull her out and let the electricity revive her.

In the dark I sit and wait to hear the flatline change. But it doesn’t. Instead the hymns of Cairo play and I return to the surface.