Egypt, Chapter I — The Red Sea and Everything I Had Asked of the World
You always leave carrying luggage and a lie.
The luggage contains clothes, lenses, chargers, and a quantity of underwear calculated according to that curious mathematical principle whereby, the moment you cross a border, you might suddenly shit yourself three times a day.
The lie, meanwhile, is that we are going to see a place.
I had not gone to Egypt merely to see Egypt.
I had gone there to be seen.
By God.
By the gods.
By destiny.
By the sea.
By whatever invisible office handled confused men, backlogged desires, and adults still emotionally parked outside the entrance to adolescence.
I had requests.
Naturally.
Human beings can turn even spirituality into customer service.
Good morning, I would like to discover my mission in life.
Preferably without too much waiting.
I would like to earn enough from what I create that I no longer have to regard my passion as an economically suspicious hobby.
I would like to meet someone capable of walking in my direction—not behind me gathering the pieces, nor ahead dragging me by the leash.
I would like to become a better man.
More mature.
More stable.
Less like that overgrown child who keeps demanding absolute freedom and then acts surprised when freedom presents the bill.
Modest requests.
I had basically crossed the Mediterranean to order a new life with an ocean view.
Egypt seemed like the right place.
A land old enough to have heard every possible question. A country where men built monuments to outlive death, questioned the sky, worshiped the sun, and entrusted eternity with their bodies, their names, and probably a few family grudges as well.
They say desires can find a path there.
That certain places can gather them.
Carry them higher.
Or farther away.
Legends are generous.
They never have to pay for the expectations they create.
I arrived full of hope anyway.
This journey was recent.
Not an old story exhumed from a hard drive, covered in dust and improved by amnesia. The images were still close. The colors had not had time to fade, and I had not yet invented a wiser version of the man who took them.
I remembered the cold I had come from.
The short days.
The gray sky.
That kind of winter that enters not only through windows, but into conversations, thoughts, and the way you look at the future. Everything seems harder when the world has already turned out the lights at five in the afternoon and you still have to pretend enthusiasm for the rest of the day.
Then came the warmth.
Not the violence of summer heat, capable of turning every human being into an irritable piece of meat soaked in its own sweat.
It was the right kind of warmth.
The sort of temperature that persuades the body to forgive you for dragging it all that way.
Air against the skin.
The sun.
Palm trees.
And behind them, the sea.
The Red Sea appeared between the branches without any special effects.
A calm expanse.
A distant pier.
A boat.
Colors that seemed to have settled long ago any dispute between blue and green.
I stood watching it.
I expected something.
A sign, perhaps.
A voice.
A sudden clarity.
The unmistakable feeling that every wrong choice had nevertheless led me to the right place.
The sea, with remarkable professionalism, did fuck-all.
It kept moving.
That was the first lesson.
I had crossed thousands of miles with a list of desires, and it did not seem remotely impressed.
Then again, how many men arrive before the sea convinced that their confusion is special?
How many hand it dead loves, unbearable jobs, broken promises, and dreams that have begun to stink inside a drawer?
The sea receives everything.
Not because it is good.
Because it cannot stop us from talking to it.
Soon afterward, I looked at the landscape through a square opening.
Pale earth.
Low buildings.
Palm trees.
Sky.
The world appeared framed, as though someone had cut a window through the wall to grant me a preview of Egypt without yet allowing me to truly enter.
It seemed appropriate.
I had spent much of my life that way.
Looking at existence through a frame.
The camera.
A screen.
A future project.
An imagined relationship.
The version of me I would become as soon as I had enough money, enough courage, enough love, or a sufficiently reduced number of psychological problems.
Always close.
Never completely inside.
Perhaps I had gone there precisely to cross through that window.
Or at least to stop photographing it as though a good composition could resolve the fact that I was standing on the wrong side.
Among the structures, I encountered a man.
The deep blue beams formed an almost perfect geometry around him. He held a hand near his mouth. Perhaps he was smoking. Perhaps thinking. Perhaps merely waiting for his shift to end or for that strange photographer to stop pointing a lens at him.
I did not know his life.
I had no right to turn him into the mystical guardian of my journey simply because the color behind him was photogenic.
He probably had concrete problems.
Hours to work.
People to support.
Things to buy.
I arrived with questions about the soul’s mission.
It is easy to become spiritual when someone else makes the bed, carries the luggage, and keeps running the place where you decided to find yourself.
That man remained inside the blue.
I pressed the shutter.
For an instant, we looked at each other.
No revelation occurred.
But something began to crack.
Perhaps the journey would not be the story of a place willing to grant my wishes.
Perhaps it would be the story of my presumption that it should.
The pier entered the sea like an overlong sentence.
Below, posts and beams divided the water into portions of light and shadow. The lines were precise. The sea was not.
Every pier is a compromise.
You want to move toward the water, but you are not yet willing to get wet.
You want to leave the land, yet demand that someone build a floor beneath your feet.
It is assisted courage.
And it resembled me.
I too wanted to change, provided change came with handrails, clear instructions, and a money-back guarantee.
I wanted to discover my mission without enduring that long period during which a mission resembles nothing more than a series of failed attempts.
I wanted to live from my creations without confronting the possibility that no one was willing to pay for them.
I wanted someone beside me, preferably without having to surrender the selfish habits built over years spent deciding alone.
I wanted to grow up without ceasing to be free.
In practice, I wanted to learn to swim without lifting my feet from the pier.
The water below me was transparent.
You could see the sand, ripples along the bottom, and every variation of light. Nothing seemed to need hiding.
I felt a certain envy.
Transparency is easy when you are water.
Much less so when you are a man who has spent years telling himself convenient versions of his choices.
I said I wanted to be free.
Sometimes I was simply afraid of commitment.
I said I wanted to follow creativity.
Sometimes I was simply afraid of being judged inside an ordinary job.
I said I was waiting for the right person.
Perhaps I was waiting for someone patient enough to accept all the parts of me I still had not found the courage to change.
The sea showed its depths.
I did not.
There was an empty bench on the pier.
It waited before the horizon.
I do not know why empty seats always manage to look melancholy. They are objects. They do not suffer. They do not check their phones. They do not remember who sat there last.
We are the ones who fill them.
I saw someone’s place there.
Not a particular woman.
Not a face I already knew.
A presence.
Someone capable of sitting beside me without feeling the need to fill every silence. Someone who could look in the same direction and, when necessary, remind me that sharing a direction does not mean possessing each other.
I had longed for company many times.
But desiring someone and knowing how to share the road are two different things.
The overgrown child wants to be loved without conditions.
A man should learn that love is not a substitute mother, a rehabilitation clinic, or a rescue team specializing in the recovery of emotionally lost males.
He wants someone beside him.
But he must also become someone worth remaining beside.
The bench remained empty.
The sea made no promises.
A rope was wound around a post.
Thick.
Worn.
It was there to hold something in place.
Boats, structures, pieces of the world the water would otherwise carry away.
I thought about everything I had tied myself to.
People.
Places.
Fears.
Older versions of myself.
We convince ourselves every bond saves us from drifting. Sometimes it does. Other times we are merely rotting in the same harbor and calling our lack of courage to leave stability.
I did not know whether I needed a rope or a knife.
Probably both.
In the proper order.
A school of small fish passed beneath the surface.
Hundreds of blue and silver bodies moved together. They changed direction without colliding, without arguing
No fish appeared to be suffering a vocational crisis.
None broke from the school to launch a podcast about marine leadership.
They swam.
They knew where to go or, more simply, knew how to exist within movement.
I had always searched for a destination capable of justifying the journey.
They seemed to suggest that perhaps participating in the current was enough.
It was a fascinating theory.
Too bad I was a man and not a sardine.
Men need meaning.
They search for it in jobs, in love, in photographs, and even in fish that never asked to become metaphors.
I reached a sheltered area.
From the shade, the sea could be seen blazing beneath the sun. Tables, structures, counters, and openings turned the horizon into décor.
It was the more tourist-oriented section.
The part where beauty is organized, made accessible, and preferably accompanied by ice, lemon, and a final bill.
There was a place called Sandy Bar.
Hanging shells.
Marine decorations.
Bottles filled with small remnants of the sea, lined above the counter as though infinity could be bottled, labeled, and sold with a beer.
I was not judging.
I probably would have had a drink too.
Spirituality has a surprising thirst.
Besides, human beings have always done this.
We gather fragments of what exceeds us.
A shell.
A stone.
A photograph.
A sentence.
We take them home and pretend they still contain the place they came from.
Perhaps my images were bottles too.
Small containers in which I tried to preserve the sea, the light, and the man I had been before them.
The problem is that experience evaporates.
The object remains.
The photograph remains.
A shell remains on a shelf gathering dust beside the bills.
The rest returns where it belongs.
To a time we cannot reopen.
From the resort, the sea looked perfect.
Pools.
Glass walls.
Piers.
Lounge chairs.
Openings designed expressly to let blue enter the day without allowing sand to dirty the floor too much.
Even paradise, when professionally managed, has schedules, maintenance, and underpaid staff.
An old mechanical structure remained near the water.
A pulley, a winch, something designed to lift weight that had survived long enough to become almost decorative.
The metal bore the marks of salt.
I liked it more than many new things.
It made no attempt to hide its labor.
It had done a job.
It had grown old.
It was still there.
I wanted to live from what I created, but perhaps I had romanticized that too.
Creating does not mean spending your days in ecstasy before a page while the universe deposits money into your bank account out of gratitude.
Creating is a winch.
You pull.
You lift.
You repeat.
Salt enters the gears.
Something breaks.
You repair it.
Most days no fucking, flirtatious muse arrives. There is only the work and the part of you stubborn enough to show up anyway.
Perhaps the resources I was seeking would not fall from the sky.
Perhaps I would have to build them.
An irritating thought.
I had always hoped for a more cinematic solution.
A little farther on, I found a hammock.
Empty.
Stretched between rope and wood before the sea.
It looked like the perfect invitation to do nothing.
At least with my eyes, I lay down.
The problem is that resting the body does not necessarily turn off the mind.
You can stand before one of the most beautiful seas in the world and continue arguing in your head with someone who is not there.
You can feel sun on your skin and think about the cold you came from.
You can listen to the waves and wonder whether you are wasting your life.
External peace does not have automatic access to the nervous system.
It needs a password.
I had forgotten mine years ago.
The hammock barely swayed.
Perhaps maturity began there too.
Learning to stay.
Not produce.
Not photograph.
Not seek answers.
Not turn every moment into material for something that comes later.
Naturally, I photographed the hammock.
No one heals everything in one afternoon.
Two people walked along the beach.
Farther ahead, a woman carried a bag reading “Egypt.”
The country’s name swung against her side.
It made me smile.
We visit a place and buy an object bearing its name so that, once home, we can prove we were there.
As though the desert could fit inside a bag.
As though the sea could be printed on cotton.
As though wearing a land’s name were enough to have truly crossed it.
I did not merely want to bring Egypt home.
I wanted Egypt to carry something of me away.
The confusion.
The fear of not having enough.
The conviction that I was late.
That eternal feeling that real life was about to begin just beyond the next decision.
I did not yet know places rarely lighten our load.
More often they add new questions to the luggage.
A vendor sat on the sand with a few objects before him.
His small business arranged beside the tourists’ legs, the sea, and the flow of people who could stop or ignore him.
I did not know how much he had sold.
I did not know his name.
And I did not want to turn him into yet another lesson in simplicity delivered by a man who would probably rather earn money than become a metaphor for a Westerner in crisis.
For me, that beach was introspection.
For him, it might have been work.
The same sun.
Two different needs.
It is easy to discuss your life’s mission once the trip has already been paid for.
Before the mission come food, shelter, health, and all those terribly unpoetic things that allow poetry to continue.
I was asking for enough resources to live by creating.
Without knowing it, that man reminded me every dream must eventually encounter a price.
And preferably someone willing to pay it.
Then came the camels.
They moved along the shore with slow steps, tall bodies, and that vaguely offended expression that seems to belong to every camel on the planet.
Behind them were the sea, tourists, and resort structures.
Ahead, the beach.
The scene contained everything a visitor expects from Egypt: ancient animals, sand, men leading them, and a landscape exotic enough to generate an industrial quantity of photographs.
And yet it did not feel fake.
It was a collision.
The desert reaching the water.
A thousand-year-old history forced to pass before a vacation resort with Wi-Fi.
The camels continued.
They were in no hurry to represent Egypt.
They carried people.
They did their job.
Like the sea, they too ignored my spiritual quest.
I began to understand that the world is not full of signs.
It is full of things that happen.
We are the desperate, creative ones who turn them into messages.
The pier kept appearing.
Seen from above.
From below.
From a distance.
Full of people.
Nearly empty.
It had become the backbone of that first day.
The road entering the sea without ever truly reaching another shore.
Perhaps a life’s mission resembles that more than we would like to admit.
It does not always lead to a destination.
Sometimes it serves only to carry you far enough from land to let you see it differently.
Farther on, the beach changed.
The orderly structures thinned out.
Empty umbrellas appeared, wooden skeletons, stretches of sand that seemed abandoned halfway through a project. Isolated structures occupied the boundary between coast and desert.
It was no longer the sea prepared for guests.
It was the back of the promise.
Every tourist destination has a front and a back.
At the front are cocktails, folded towels, and the idea that the world was built for your rest.
At the back are dirt roads, stacked materials, unfinished buildings, work shifts, and everything that must remain outside the frame so the vacation can continue looking spontaneous.
That part drew me.
Perhaps because I too was unfinished.
A structure begun with enthusiasm and then left exposed to the wind while someone tried to remember where the original plans had gone.
I wanted to become more mature.
But I did not want to kill the child.
The child had imagination, wonder, recklessness, and an extraordinary ability to believe everything was still possible.
The problem was that I had let him drive too long.
A child can choose the music.
He can suggest detours.
He can remind you the world is not only work and responsibility.
But perhaps he should not manage the bank account, choose every relationship, or make final decisions at three in the morning after a bottle of wine.
Maturing did not mean burying him.
It meant taking away the car keys.
A white heron appeared beneath the pier.
It walked through the shallows with absolute slowness.
Every step seemed calculated.
No wasted movement.
No visible anxiety.
No need to prove it was productive.
Not far away, another, darker heron watched the water.
It remained still.
Waited.
Then the white one struck.
One precise gesture.
A fish held in its beak.
Done.
No creative visualization.
No goal list.
No seminar on attracting abundance.
It was hungry.
It had waited.
It acted.
It ate.
Nature knows how to be brutally effective when it does not have to build an identity around every gesture.
I, meanwhile, could turn even choosing dinner into a meditation on personal failure.
I watched the heron and thought that perhaps a mission was not a revelation.
Perhaps it was attention.
Remaining still enough to see what passes.
And ready enough to move when something that matters finally does.
At the shore, a formation of rock and coral created a small arch.
The sea passed beyond it.
Fragile things had assumed resilient forms. Time, salt, and water had worked without hurry.
No one had asked the landscape to be complete by thirty.
No one had explained that by its age it should already possess a clear direction, a house, a stable relationship, a growing income, and photographs happy enough to convince others everything was proceeding according to plan.
Perhaps I was late only according to a schedule invented by people as frightened as I was.
A woman sat on the pier.
Around her passed tourists, bodies exposed to the sun, towels, conversations, and that particular noise made by people busy enjoying themselves.
She seemed alone.
Perhaps she was not.
Perhaps she was waiting for someone.
Perhaps she was resting.
But I saw a distance.
The way you can be separated from the world even when the world passes inches away.
Loneliness does not depend on how many people are present.
You can sleep beside someone for years and never be reached.
You can sit alone before the sea and feel, for the first time, accompanied.
I was asking for someone with whom to share the road.
Not someone to erase loneliness.
That would have been too great a responsibility and, frankly, a fraud.
I wanted someone capable of crossing it with me.
Two solitudes choosing to remain close without pretending to become one thing.
The hanging shells moved in the wind.
Remnants of marine lives turned into decoration.
Something had inhabited those forms.
Then left.
We gathered what remained and called it beauty.
Perhaps creating meant this too.
Taking the empty shells.
The losses.
The mistakes.
The wasted years.
The people who did not stay.
Giving them a form that could make music when the wind passed through.
Not erasing the pain.
Using it without allowing it to use you.
Behind the coast, the land hardened.
Dirt roads.
Towers.
Cables.
Low buildings.
Pale domes resting upon an arid landscape.
From there, the sea seemed almost impossible.
A few yards were enough for blue to disappear, leaving dust, infrastructure, and scattered buildings between nothingness and a real-estate promise.
That was the border that interested me.
Water and desert.
Abundance and absence.
The place where two extremes touched without canceling each other out.
Opposing things lived together inside me too.
Hope and cynicism.
The need for love and the fear of dependence.
The desire to be seen and the desire to hide.
The wish to mature and nostalgia for all the irresponsibility that had made me feel alive.
Perhaps becoming a better person did not mean eliminating contradictions.
It meant ceasing to use them as an excuse.
Several birds rested among the branches.
The waves, meanwhile, had changed their voice.
At first the sea had been a calm, almost well-mannered surface. Now it raced along the coast, lifted foam, struck the shore, and withdrew.
I liked the transformation.
Permanent serenity is suspicious.
It resembles a pharmaceutical advertisement or the social profile of a couple approaching divorce.
Living things change their mood.
The sea could be clear, gentle, violent, dark, and luminous in the same day.
No one accused it of inconsistency.
We humans, meanwhile, are asked to define ourselves.
Who are you?
What do you want?
Where do you see yourself in five years?
As though a person were a contract to complete.
I did not know where I saw myself.
That was precisely why I was there.
A man in a yellow shirt walked through the shallow water near the pier.
The color separated him from the blue.
He seemed to belong to both worlds: the one built above the sea and the one the sea kept erasing below.
Perhaps he was working.
Perhaps checking something.
I did not know.
But his body in the water made the scale of the landscape clear.
The sea was enormous.
We were small.
Our ambitions smaller still, however completely they managed to occupy our heads.
I encountered the man among the blue structures again.
This time he was smiling.
His face had opened.
The color around him no longer resembled a geometric cage, but a frame.
I do not know whether he recognized me.
Perhaps he was smiling at someone else.
Perhaps I needed that smile to be meant for me.
Photographs allow this kind of small emotional appropriation.
We take an instant belonging to someone else and insert it into our story.
But that smile gave me something.
Not an answer.
A lightening.
Perhaps I had asked too much of Egypt.
Mission.
Money.
Love.
Maturity.
A new version of myself, preferably delivered before the return flight.
The place, meanwhile, had begun offering me tiny things.
A gentle temperature.
Transparent water.
A man smiling.
A heron waiting.
An empty bench.
Perhaps hope does not always arrive as a door flung open.
Sometimes it is merely a crack through which enough light enters to keep you from stumbling over the next step.
The afternoon began to bend.
One person sat alone.
Others walked along the pier.
The sun lowered behind the structures and turned bodies into silhouettes.
With light behind them, everyone lost their details.
There were no longer ages, nationalities, beauty, imperfections, or social roles.
Only figures moving along a walkway suspended between sky and water.
I watched those people and thought about whom I wanted beside me.
Not a savior.
Not a spectator.
Not someone to impress with grand speeches about creativity while leaving her to manage the less poetic parts of existence.
A companion on the road.
Someone capable of telling me the truth even when truth possessed all the elegance of an ashtray thrown at my forehead.
Someone with desires of her own.
A direction of her own.
The freedom to walk beside me without becoming my shadow.
But first I had to learn to walk.
Not drag myself.
Not run only when I was frightened.
Not stop every time initial enthusiasm gave way to discipline.
Walk.
That simple verb I had complicated my entire life.
The sun turned red.
Not the romantic red of travel brochures.
A full, almost ferocious red suspended above the arid land. It resembled an ancient eye that had watched enough generations to feel no surprise at our private tragedies.
I had entrusted my desires to it.
Not with any precise ritual.
No candles, priests, or formulas spoken in the proper language were needed.
I had carried them there inside my body.
They were in every photograph.
In the empty bench was the desire for someone.
In the pier, the desire for a direction.
In the transparent water, the will to know myself without continuing to lie.
In the vendor and the weathered structures was the need to turn creation into a concrete life.
In the overgrown child photographing everything was the hope that becoming an adult did not mean becoming dead.
The sun went down.
Nothing happened.
No voice spoke my name.
No god handed me an action plan.
My bank balance remained unchanged.
The love of my life did not appear at the end of the pier, hair moving in the wind and a particular fondness for complicated men.
Maturity did not strike me like lightning.
Frankly, that would have been suspicious.
Real transformations rarely grant us a climactic scene.
They begin in silence and then demand years of maintenance.
The moon arrived.
Its light fell across the sea and built a white road upon the dark water.
The palms became shadows.
A figure remained on the beach.
The distant pier lit a few lamps.
At night, the place lost its tourist layer.
The colors of the lounge chairs, signs, decorations, and everything trying to suggest how we ought to feel disappeared.
The water remained.
The sky.
The distance.
And me.
Before the night sea, the questions seemed more honest.
I did not know whether I would find my mission.
I did not know whether my creations would become strong enough to support me.
I did not know whether someone would choose to travel the road with me.
I did not even know whether I would truly manage to become a better man or remain that overgrown child, merely carrying new photographs and a few more wrinkles.
I still do not know.
That is the part well-constructed stories tend to hide.
We like journeys with a clear transformation.
The man leaves confused.
Crosses a magical land.
Receives a revelation.
Returns changed.
Roll credits.
Real life has a messier screenplay and a considerably smaller budget.
Sometimes you return still confused.
But with better questions.
Sometimes the desire is not granted.
It simply keeps working inside you.
It forces you to choose.
To renounce.
To become, day after day, the person capable of carrying its weight.
Perhaps a desire is not something you entrust to the world for the world to fulfill.
Perhaps it is a responsibility.
When you ask to live from your art, you are promising to create even when no one applauds.
When you ask for someone beside you, you are promising to learn not to destroy what you love.
When you ask to become better, you accept that the old version of you will protest, lie, and continually try to take back the keys.
When you ask for a mission, you must be ready for the possibility that no one will tell you what it is.
You will have to build it.
The moon continued reflecting on the water.
The bright road seemed to reach me, but I knew it was an illusion. I needed only to move and it would move with me.
Perhaps direction works that way.
It is not a line already drawn before our feet.
It appears as we move.
That night, I entrusted my desires to the Red Sea.
All of them.
The noble ones.
The selfish ones.
The romantic ones.
The financial ones, which remain decidedly unspiritual but pay the rent beautifully.
I handed it the man I was and the one I still hoped to become.
The sea received them without enthusiasm.
It signed no receipt.
Promised no results.
Did not tell me how long I would have to wait.
It merely kept moving beneath the moon, ancient and indifferent, while the lights of the pier trembled in the distance.
I do not know whether Egypt will grant what I asked of it.
Perhaps places grant nothing.
Perhaps they merely give us enough distance from our lives to finally hear what we truly desire.
That night, I received no answers.
But for the first time, I formed the questions without lying.
And perhaps, as a beginning, that was enough.
I left my desires with the sea.
The sea promised me nothing.
But it did not give them back.