In December 2016, I was informed by my company that there has been an organizational change I can either choose to relocate to Poland or Singapore. The news came as a shock as I was not interested in the weak financial proposal from Poland and the prospect of moving to the far east. I had no plan B so I was uncertain and frustrated. My boss promised to keep trying to hook me up with an opportunity in other locations in Europe. A few months earlier that year one of my closest friends moved to Berlin to work for an online shopping giant. He was one of the last close friends I had left in Egypt and it seemed that it is only a matter of time till I find myself a lone in cruel Cairo.
As per the in laws tradition, we went to Paris for Christmas. I was distant, confused and not in a happy place. My partner and I decided to go to Berlin for new years eve to celebrate the wedding anniversary and celebrate the beginning of 2017. However, at that point we were fighting all the time with brief truces of calmness and desperate attempts to enjoy time. The trip to Berlin was catastrophic in every way. My partner got sick the night of the travel so she spent agonizing 8 hours in the train. It was a specially cold winter and we were not prepared. As she rested at home I took the opportunity to catch up with my friend and see Berlin a little. If there is a city that would earn the title “sin city”, it is Berlin. Everything is allowed in Berlin and everyone is revolting against everything. I felt as if I have been submerged in water and finally I could raise my head up and get some air.
Here, I would like to invite you to my mind at that time. At this point all my hopes and dreams for Egypt have died, I lost 2 friends to suicide, my career was at the verge of collapsing, and my family life was at its lowest. My problem was not that I lived in Egypt anymore or that the Egyptian revolution failed. My crises was existential. My feelings were frozen and my eyes were dead. I could not stand those who went about as if everything was just fine, as if life was a holiday, a dream or a theme park. I am cursed with true sensibility, betrayed every day by the injustice of the world and life seemed like a long spell of prison time and a long illness with no remission. This is why Berlin made sense to me. Everything is allowed in Berlin and those who choose to live there are in constant revolt for liberation. It is a dark, dirty and loud place where waves of human go on and on defying everything any society has ever stood for. It is a city that paid the price of human cruelty and has nothing to prove, nothing to demonstrate, Berlin is vulgar because to survive in this society you have to be vulgar . It is a city city for those who seek oblivion. Berlin was the city that witnessed all the evil and horrors of WWII and the hypocrisy of the “Liberators”. It is a city that saw it all and decided to stand tall and tell the world FUCK YOU.
The trip back to Paris was quiet. I was reflecting on my trip and part of me was not ready to give up. I was not ready to submit and I could feel the fire inside of me again, a true desire to start over and leave my ruins behind. In 2nd of January 2017, I receive a phone call from a former boss who tells me about an opportunity in Paris in a leading multinational. I agree to explore it so I meet with the person in charge on a cafe in Paris. By March 2017 I got a written offer to which I agreed. I was thrilled and anxious and scared. I am finally leaving Egypt, I will finally be able to start over again and forget all the traumas Cairo has inflicted on me. On the marriage front everything that could go wrong went wrong. In April, I decided to go to the red sea to dive. I came back one day before my partner’s birthday. The following day after a brief birthday party with her family we had a major fight. This time I was calm, I did not try to defend my behavior or position towards things. After the yelling stopped I asked calmly for divorce. We tried many things to fix the marriage but it was just too broken to be revived. We hid the news from the families because we did not want unnecessary drama in addition to the moving drama. By June 2017, I said goodbye to people I knew very well that I will never see again. This time my journey started with me and my dog a lone. Montie was three and half years old. The first night we spent in Paris we have no furniture so we both slept in my sleeping bag. I broke free and I had a blank page for me to write.
A whole new life is about to begin, stay tuned…
On the Search for Home 