Fear

Sometimes it just swells up from somewhere. Like on my way home from apartment hunting. This place, I don't know where it comes from. It's fleeting and enough to shock the smile off of my face.

It's starts in front of a television screen. The sun is setting outside on the balcony, the last rays radiating on my bare toes. It starts with a fixation on this television set. It slowly sucks me into the chaos 3 hours south of me. Places I've been, places I loved visiting. A whole district engulfed in flames. Anger. Brimming to the top, bursting at the seams. Mobs over-running and burning armored paddy wagons, pushing them into the Nile. Water cannons blasting, people being gunned down and targeted to be run over by security forces. Police beating men and boys, blood running down their faces. Smoke engulfing the hail of rubber and live bullets firing on crowds of people. The prayer at sunset begins, silence falls along with thousands of human beings to their knees. A creeping dusk rolls through my screen, filling the sitting room, and out the balcony. Cairo is on fire. The smell of smoke fills my nostrils, as if I were there. But this wasn't my imagination. As the warm glow of street light filled the room, so did signs of the same angry strife in Alexandria. Men shouting outside, boys running, guns shooting in the background. Was that an M-16? Had the jails been breached here too? The man on my screen sounds concerned. "Get out! Don't let them in! Shut the door, you hear me? Shut the door! The police are coming...maybe to shut down the station," shouts the reporter in Arabic. Bangs on the station door 3 hours south in Cairo. Will my only source of information be cut? No phone, no internet. No television?  More shouts, my heart almost stops. Where the hell was I?

My thoughts are perhaps the most terrifying to me. How am I going to get out of the country? The road to Cairo is closed, trains shut down. I can't get to the airport. I don't even want to leave this apartment to get my belongings across the neighborhood. How do Egyptians see me? A collaborator with their government? With my "money" that all Westerners are purported to carry? Will I be a target in this revolutionary furious fervor? No, my Arabic is good. I'll speak Shamy, they'll think I'm Lebanese. Just enough time to walk to the consulate. I won't take a cab, I don't want to die. What? Die? Christ, did I really just think that? I thought about being detoured somewhere awful, kidnapped, ransomed. The television beckons me back to reality. Night has fallen on the 6th October Bridge over the Nile as the city descends into a night of fiery chaos. Al-Jazeera survives feed cuts to illuminate events as they explode. The National Democratic Party building is set on fire, the ultimate symbolic challenge to Mubarak and his legitimacy.  I remember my words from Tuesday "There is no turning back; this regime will fall." Looters sack government buildings and throw Molotov cocktails. It's happening fast, I can't process this from the comfort of my ottoman.

I turn out the lights as I wait. I don't want to draw attention to myself. I wait for them to come home. They're both late. Are they hurt? I smell smoke. A jet flies over head. A jet? I've never heard planes OR jets over Alexandria. Had the military been deployed? Distant, riotous screams echo through the narrow streets of Kafr Abdu, my neighborhood. In this instant, I realize that I am alone in the most true sense. I have no information. My friends are gone, and I don't if they are injured, tear gassed, kidnapped, or...yeah, dead. It wasn't the Egypt I knew yesterday. I was trapped in an apartment with no way out. My eyes began to water. I'd never been so alone, so afraid. So not-in-control of my life, or events around me. Again, I instinctively reach for my cell phone to call home to say I'm alive...shit, they don't work. I grow angry. How can someone just cut off information from a population? How is this legal?! This man is toying with lives! And mine, goddamn it! Fuck Hosni Mubarak and fuck the police, fuck the government-hired thugs, and fuck all of his party members. Most of all, Fuck you Vodafone for cutting off my service! You are cowards and dupes; I hope that they hang you all for treason against your people! You are causing death and supporting a dictator!

This wasn't my fight. I was a peripheral figure in a total system shakeup that was tearing the old fabric of society and challenging the very root of authority that had held Egypt together for the past 50 years. There could not have been more uncertainty than in that moment in Kafr Abdu for me. Never in my life had I felt this helpless, unsure, and afraid. This is the epitome of fear, something I had never had the displeasure of ever experiencing. Thoughts oscillating between entrapment, hopeless prospects of escape, death, injury, and the bombardment of images, smells, and sounds of anger and destruction boiling into the tired streets of Egypt.

Despite the lengthy description of what just preceded, the memory lasts a second at most. I don't see or smell or hear, but I feel it. This complicated experience that ignited every one of my senses channels itself through an electric chill that runs from my brain down my spine and back again. It stings my eyes, wipes the smile off my face, and stops any activity I am engaged in. For that split second, I feel so terrified.  I'm not here, but in that sitting room in front of a television screen. I feel it.

This is Fear.

Sometimes I still feel so alone.