(October 2025, Egypt)
The sun was the only thing in the sky. No wonder the Egyptians put it above sea, sand, stone, and soul…
The last time I went to the beach with my parents, I was a kid. Every evening, my mother would say: “Tomorrow we’ll go and watch the sunrise”. But I loved my sleep too much, my mother loved my sleep, and the sunrise never happened. Now, in Hurghada, I set my alarm for 5:30, oversleep 10 minutes, and run to find my mom quiet between the sad colors of the dawn, her phone ready to catch the first spark of fire. Once out, the sun climbs the spiral staircase of a metal tower, then at the top … hops … leaps … towards the tower at the other end of the sky. My mom catches all the sunrises. I catch all the sunsets. Why is it that we have to become adults to see the children in our parents?
I grew up between angels and demons, born straight from the blue, illustrated Bible where I discovered letters long before the start of school. So I knew very well the fear of the judgement day. Years later, I read “Anna Karenina”: she kept making choices I’d never make. Yet somehow, staying with her until the end, I understood. Where was the judgement day? I don’t know. I just discovered empathy.
Egypt is vast. Between two drops of sand, one on the Red Sea, one on the Nile, there are 5 hours by bus. Coming back from the Valley of Kings, we stopped at a souvenir shop. I was fascinated by a basalt plaque. I played the game of negotiation, and got the price down past the seller’s frown. I had no idea what I’d taken. Back on the bus, I took a photo and asked ChatGPT. It was a scene from the Egyptian judgement day. “What do I do with this?” I asked my dad. “You need it, you have too much empathy”.
According to the Egyptians, when you died, your heart was weighed on a balance against a feather. But that didn’t make any sense to me. It shouldn’t be the light heart, nor the heavy heart, that fails the judgement, but the heart that cannot be known.
And since no god can judge it … I’ll ask you, my dear reader, to be witness and stay with me until the ritual is complete. I’ll trust you to keep the candles lit. To laugh, to cry, be bored, when you feel like it.
But stay.
Until the end.
The scrolls are open. In the darkness, you can only see the eyes of the gods, and the thin threads of memory that make up the heart, pouring all their weight against the scales:
Your feathers turn wood, you become trees, your hands are leaves that cover the little creature. But you never knew that she is the fire before creation and you turned into the wrong thing. Now you bleed ash, you breathe smoke. She grew up before the word became flesh, her words when not tender were birds fleeing an owl that never hunted, then turning back in flocks to chase it; her words were octopi flooding ink to hide the location of Atlantis…
I didn’t know who I was anymore. I became very old, ancient…
When language breaks, you are left with the punctuation marks.
The journey to the graves of kings was more fun than I expected. Open people always sit in the back of the bus. They are the only ones from their poor neighborhood who spend what savings they have to travel everywhere. They buy souvenirs for their friends, but don’t have money to pay for the toilet. They watch all the youtube videos and know more about the tombs than the tour guide. Across from me sits a lady from Chicago, who tells me about her twenty-year marriage. Finding herself again. The new boyfriend she left because he prepared her a romantic dinner with KFC take away. “I’m 60, you see, but check out that tour guide, he really likes me.” Everybody likes her. Except for my parents, they’re jealous that I made a new friend and I don’t hang out with them anymore.
The Egyptians knew how to make a mummy. Plenty of mummies have been found. But no risen bodies.
“Even if you pass the test, if you want to become a body again”, say the gods, “you’ll have to make up your own ritual”.
I don’t remember how I built my bones back together from punctuation marks. The rest … was fish. A school of fish, dried in sea salt, spread across waterless containers.
I tasted the salt, I ate the salt, I made more salt. It was the bitter salt of tears. I spit it back into the sea, together with the fish. Dance, run, come alive again!
Fish become fish become fish, anger and fear and sadness and grief and fear again, like luggage moving faster fast fast down a conveyor belt that runs to the waterfall at the edge of the world.
Faster fast faaast! I cannot grow old, I cannot die, I must be young again!
Faster fast fast the luggage falls down down down and breaks into rocks. The rocks become fish, the luggage becomes more fish, and the sharks and the whales and the crocodiles bite, but the fish … just jump and fly.
We’re on a boat flying down the Nile. Me, my parents, the Chicago lady and another family. The driver lets each of us guide the motor. We find out we have to pay for it. In dollars.
“You’re really cool!”, says the Chicago lady. “What are you doing here, just you, and your parents?”
When we reach land we walk a little away from the others. I tell her a story that not even my parents knew.
“Have I done everything I could?”
She turns to me dead serious: “Don’t!”.
The mortuary room is quiet. The gods are taking notes, the walls are taking notes, the air is taking notes. Only a tiny noise screeches the ceiling, a repeated click… louder, louder, and then … suddenly … with a thump, a chicken drops through the stone. The floor becomes legs running, searching for no exit, a beak knocking on the walls, until the fish, eagles and crocodiles leap out of the hieroglyphs, and run between the legs, and search and knock and ruffle. The feather that was supposed to weigh the heart is now tickling the gods, the heart that was sitting on the scales grows frog feet and starts hopping around.
The walls tremble with movement, the gods fumble and tumble, and then, exhausted by the effort … silence.
You’d have expected the verdict to be followed by a hammer. But what you hear instead is the soft voice of water springing through the new wall cracks:
After escaping nameless, pointless labyrinths, after having the earth beneath your feet swapped with water, sky and earth again and again until your hands became legs and you could hear with your nose, if you made up the ritual to turn the mummy into a body, if you danced the dance to rise up, if you stared into mythical darkness and remembered the days when you smiled, if your old fears have turned dried petals that fly away with a soft whisper, then you can finally stand straight, and face the world, like never before.
I never heard back from the Chicago lady. Maybe she is riding the greens of Patagonia, walking the Great Wall of China, or shaking hands with penguins in Antarctica. Buying souvenirs made of ice that doesn’t melt. I hope she is.
Back home, my grandpa waited. He’s annoyed by the arching of his back, but neither that, nor his 86 years of age, can stop him from biking the 5 km to the city. He talks to ChatGPT to find out how he can keep the snails away from his garden. “Try sawdust around the roots”, “I will!”.
Since I was a kid, he chases cats with the water hose. He loves his chicken so much that he almost never travels. And for every living thing, he makes up a new name. I do that too. I often find that words don’t fit, so I have to come up with my own. And just like grandpa, it’s more fun to make up words among friends:
I met Kazantzakis for the first time 2 years ago. I read him in the car. One phrase stayed with me: ”I knew my true face and my sole duty: to work this face with as much patience, love, and skill as I could manage… to turn it into flame so that Charon would find nothing of me to take. For this was my greatest ambition: to leave nothing for death to take — nothing but a few bones.”
The Egyptians, also, threw the soft tissue or stored it away in jars. Left only the bones to carry eternity. I’ve tried that. I let the fire burn everything. Was it worth the cost, to understand Karenina? I don’t know. Books written in your body are books you never have to read again.
Hemingway wrote: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”
If you are broken day by day, punch after punch, living in a movie where the only plot seems to be discovering how much more pain the protagonist can take, you no longer have the luxury of becoming stone. You can wrap the broken fragments in a torn piece of cloth, lock them in a box, bury them under a tree, and pretend to be whole. Or you can swing them out in the open rain, until they turn mud, then silt, then stream, until the storm takes all of you except that part which had always been water. And then, all the world can do when it tries to break you is make waves. Not because water is better than stone, but because water was the only way to survive.
Every memory should have a name.
Halfspoken 