coming home to Cairo.

Today is a day of quiet.
It's only natural, perhaps—coming back from two weeks of vacation, with its busy and colorful moments, changing landscapes, wide-eyed explorations and constant companionship—it's now time instead to sink back quietly into the familiar rhythms of my city and quietly consider all that has happened in my life.

Sipping a spicy cup of Turkish coffee this morning back inside the office, I feel myself reconnecting again with the ordinary rituals and familiar characters of my daily life— the sticky keyboard I slowly punch out my daily reports on, the café man who delivers coffee to our office and shyly refuses to make eye contact with me, my Spanish-speaking Algerian co-worker spraying axe around his desk while insisting that I eat the snack food he's brought, watching the staff of the Semi Ramses hotel clean their balconies through my office window.

These things are insignificant of themselves, but vacation for the past two weeks has shown me how easy it is for me to pull up my roots here and leave behind what I've invested into Egypt. With the exception of my host family in Maasara and a handful of Egyptian friends, it was the easiest thing in the world to shut off my cellphone and leave behind Cairo for half of this month. Coming back to work, choosing to return to the ordinary rhythms of my life here, signals for me a renewal in my intention to stay put for a while. I didn't have to come back to my job. I didn't have to come back to Cairo at all. I felt that temptation on our last day in the Sinai, before taking an 8 hour bus ride from a beautiful resort on the red sea, with bouganvilla flowers punctuating the desert landscape and lights from Jordan twinkling from across the water. Part of me dug in its heels and refused to go back, didn't want to interrupt the serenity with the blaring horns and bustle of Cairo. But I did come back. And for now, it feels right.

My Egyptian friends began calling me today—where have you been? Why haven't I heard from you in three weeks?—and I realize it could be possible that, for all of the love I have for them, I haven't yet been fully present here. It means something, I think, that I could simply pause my life here without the slightest difficulty. Some day I will pick up all of my roots and leave Egypt. But for my Egyptian friends, this is their life, and I need to carefully remember that they have embraced me as more than a passing character, but as a friend. Even with all my intentions to open myself fully to Egypt, I realize now that I am not yet there.

And now, reading the New York Times for my reports on the American election, getting ready to meet new English students tonight at the language center, looking forward to seeing my co-workers there for the first time in nearly a month, my heart is warmed a bit. Even imperfectly, Cairo is home. It is good to be back.