If I sleep, I wake up in this city feeling as dull as yesterday, yet I try to get my feet up and out of the boring routine of days.
In this city and from the first hours of the day, you find curses crushing all beginnings on the paths of your way to your workplace, near you crossing an Arab Asian cursing in a traffic accident, a traffic man tired of the trouble of standing for long, embedded perhaps in a text conversation on his phone, on the right a crowd of street cleaning workers in the trunk of a transport vehicle, accompanied by the sun, without permission, from the north children in a school bus take their morning class, a lesson in the arts of chaos and road fights, then go to the queue and classes in literature, morals, and science!
You look back, giant banners and pictures within patriotic frames, billboards, and Islamic phrases on both sides of the streets crowded with cement blocks everywhere, you notice a woman stopping a taxi, driving around you only find women in the back seats with drivers from outside!
I come back in the evening, I search for what in all living cities is called 'downtown', I look for elegant lanes or the address of a museum and art gallery, well, I look for a side park and a fountain garden around where readers sit.
I look for cafés not attended by the suspicion of segregation, partitions, enclosures, and crowding of sexually addressed men/women, I want a human-only café with no forced labels.
Here people come out of the prisons of their homes to other prisons of restaurants and entertainment to eating a meal with the fear of life, suspicion sits with them on the benches and between the tables!
I randomly limped to the other side, perhaps looking for a guitarist with a hat on the sidewalk and a sign saying, “I’m not a beggar... I’m raising money for the aged care center.” Or I was digging for a painter who would paint some pale walls or clear the dirt gray sidewalk, only empty water bottles, beverage containers, and napkins!
I wished myself the scene of a spontaneous meeting, a spontaneous hug, a spontaneous kiss, anything simple or spontaneous, I only found teams of observers and preachers tracking everything, even women's shoes, fabrics, nails, and people's intentions!
A city whose everything resembles the desert around it, similar in everything, male and female fashion, building paint and designs, vegetation dwindling from palm fronds, dust piling on glass facades, it is abnormal geography of life that tells you of an intellectual dominance that penetrates all the joints of living!
I wanted to meet life, but she apologized, and I was a fool looking for life in the city of my dead!